One of the real big struggles for our clients involve accruing medical bills and expenses while a case is pending. No-fault will cover medical expenses from an automobile accident, but only for a certain amount of time and only sometimes until those benefits are exhausted. Your standard automobile insurance policy in New York, those benefits are only $50,000. And when an injury is very serious and requires hospitalizations and surgeries, that $50,000 gets exhausted pretty quickly.
So then we have to ask, does a client have personal medical insurance? If they do, and the no-fault has been exhausted, those bills then have to be submitted to an insurance company, a medical insurance company. They have their own concerns about what they should and should not be paying for. So that’s always a troubling situation for our clients to be in and something that they’re concerned with. We always assist. We always speak to the medical insurance companies, explain to them why no-fault is no longer paying because it’s been exhausted to make sure bills are properly submitted to a carrier.
Sometimes our clients don’t have that personal medical insurance. Those medical bills accrue and the bills come in the mail and then the letters from other law firms start coming in the mail threatening, “This is a debt. Pay your debt.” Day one, when we receive one of those letters, we immediately reach out to the provider, the doctor, or if there’s a law firm trying to collect a debt and explain the situation, say, “Hey, our firm represents this young man, this young woman. They’ve been in a very serious accident. If there are medical bills due, my client will make you whole as they’re obligated to at the end of the case.” And we sign something that’s called a letter of protection or a lien where applicable.
But that medical facility knows that as long as their billing is proper, and we always make sure that it is, that those bills will be paid at the end of a case. It can’t take blood from a stone is an old saying. Some of our clients can’t afford to pay these bills.
They’re suffering. They’ve been through something they didn’t expect. They didn’t ask for. So we work with all the medical providers to make sure that they’re protected. And at the end of the case, the bills that have to be paid are properly paid. And we use that as part of an evaluation as to what is the value of a case. If a case is worth $100,000 and there are no medical bills, so be it. If a case is worth $100,000, but there’s $20,000 in medical bills, I could never resolve that case for that same $100,000. So, knowing if there are medical bills outstanding, knowing if there are medical liens, is very important when negotiating and working out what the actual value is on a person’s case.