Lawyers typically do not directly reduce medical bills themselves. However, they can play a role in negotiating with medical providers and insurance companies to potentially lower the amount you owe for medical expenses as part of a legal settlement or lawsuit. The extent to which medical bills can be reduced depends on various factors, including the circumstances of the case, the severity of injuries, insurance coverage, and applicable laws. Here are a few scenarios where lawyers might be involved in reducing medical bills:
- Personal Injury Claims: If you were injured due to someone else’s negligence and you file a personal injury claim, your lawyer may negotiate with the at-fault party’s insurance company to secure a settlement that covers your medical expenses. In some cases, they may be able to negotiate a reduction in medical bills as part of the settlement.
- Medical Liens: Some medical providers might place a lien on your settlement or lawsuit award to ensure they are paid for their services. Lawyers can negotiate with these providers to potentially reduce the lien amount, which could lead to a reduction in the overall medical bills you need to pay from your settlement.
- Health Insurance Negotiations: If you have health insurance and it has paid for a portion of your medical expenses, your lawyer may work to negotiate with the health insurance company to reduce the amount they are entitled to recover from your settlement.
- Out-of-Network Negotiations: If your medical treatment involved out-of-network providers and you’re facing high bills, a lawyer might negotiate with those providers to reduce the charges to a more reasonable level, especially if the treatment was necessary due to your case.
It’s important to note that the specific outcome of negotiations can vary widely depending on the circumstances. Lawyers will often try to secure the best possible outcome for their clients, which may include negotiating for reduced medical bills. However, they cannot guarantee a specific reduction amount, as this depends on the cooperation of medical providers and insurance companies.
If you’re involved in a legal case and have concerns about your medical bills, it’s crucial to discuss these matters with your lawyer. They can provide guidance based on the specifics of your situation and help you understand the potential options for addressing medical expenses within the context of your case.
If you’re the victim in a personal injury claim, you don’t always have to pay the full amount of your medical bills. After your injury verdict or compensation is final, your personal injury attorney can frequently lower your skyrocketing medical expenditures.
With this knowledge, you can decide whether or not working with a personal injury attorney to negotiate a decrease in your medical costs will enable you to save more money.
After a wreck, how am I going to pay my medical bills?
Medical care is critically necessary after a significant auto accident because it will help you detect and treat any injuries that could be life-threatening, speed up your recovery, and connect your ailments to the collision.
Even if you have health insurance, you will still need to cover your medical costs because this may get very expensive. Fortunately, your personal injury claim will allow you to include both your past and future medical expenses. This means that your lawyer will assist you in listing all of your medical conditions and forecasting all of your future medical requirements.
Your attorney will use this number to begin settlement discussions (or possibly court proceedings) and fight for the just recompense for you. Liens are legal documents that represent an interest in your personal injury claim and are typically filed by medical professionals like doctors, hospitals, healthcare providers, and even your insurance company. You must take care of these unpaid invoices and come to an agreement with your providers before you can settle or close your claim.
Your insurance may not completely pay for your medical expenses.
According to Texas law, the negligent or at-fault person is normally liable for the losses (like a written-off car) and injuries (like head wounds) suffered by their victims. Unfortunately, many individuals and companies lack sufficient liability coverage to pay for catastrophic or multiple-party lawsuits.
And to make matters worse, according to the Insurance Information Institute, 14% of Texans who own cars lack auto insurance. This could affect you because, in most cases, you will need to file additional claims with your own UM/UIM and personal injury protection (PIP) policies if you are dealing with an uninsured or underinsured motorist after being involved in an accident.
However, if you simply have little coverage or have previously opted out of these coverages, you can still owe money for medical expenses.
Medical providers could be ready to take a lesser amount to settle the unpaid debt, and a lawyer may be successful in negotiating a fair and acceptable sum. Having a personal injury lawyer on your side can be immensely helpful in this circumstance.
Furthermore, your health insurance plan may classify some services, doctors, and surgeons who treat you as being out of network even if the facility where you are receiving care is in-network. After an accident, you might even have been too injured or unconscious to make decisions about the hospital you would go to, the services you would receive, or the medications you would take.
Overall, the healthcare system is designed to prevent upfront bargaining and actual price shopping. You will need a qualified and experienced lawyer who has successfully bargained hospital costs down in the past for cases similar to yours if you want to receive the greatest deal from your healthcare provider.
How To Negotiate A Health Care Bill
A committed and skilled attorney will make every effort to negotiate lower payments on your unpaid medical bills after a verdict or settlement amount has been determined in your case. Negotiations include more than just being polite in your requests. Instead, your knowledgeable attorney will use their extensive knowledge of both law and medicine to:
Get in touch with your insurance companies and medical providers
Examine their bill statements, which are often on forms HCFA-1500 and UB-04.
Verify that the ailments are connected to your wreckk and the symptoms they caused, and check all of the billing codes twice.
In accordance with state and federal law, work with government programs like Medicare and Medicaid to safeguard their interests.
When it’s possible, try to get your medical costs reduced so you have to pay less.
Even while the majority of healthcare professionals do demand full payment for all of their services and bills, this is not unreasonable to consider negotiating discounts.
Using their special expertise, experience, information, and perspective of your case, a qualified personal injury attorney can be able to negotiate a sizeable monetary decrease on your behalf. Lowering the healthcare charge increases the likelihood that the hospital will get payment for its services, which benefits both the customer and the facility.
If you can pay in cash, that can also be a huge benefit because hospitals will frequently lower invoices rather than accept lengthy payment plans in exchange for immediate payment in full in cash.
How Does Subrogation Work?
If your personal injury claim is successful, a process known as subrogation will require you to give a portion of your payment to your health insurance provider.
This serves as an attempt to prevent the damaged party from making a “double recovery,” which is when they gain from an earlier loss. So, if your insurance company pays for your medical expense, and then your personal injury claim settlement covers those same medical expense fees, you might be seen as to have profited off of your accident.
This is why your insurance company is entitled to be reimbursed. Your injury attorney can help to explain the process to you in greater legal detail.
So How Likely Is It That My Attorney Can Reduce My Medical Bills?
It is difficult to put an exact number on how likely that it is that your lawyer will be able to reduce your medical bills, as every case and client is different. However, some personal injury attorneys suggest they will be able to reduce bills around 95% of the time.
How Much Can An Injury Lawyer Reduce My Medical Bills?
If you decide to have an experienced injury lawyer negotiate your medical bills after you have been injured in a collision or accident, you can expect that there will most likely be a change in the amount you are due to pay.
However, it is difficult to give you an accurate idea of the size of the change, without discussing the personal nuance and fact pattern of your specific case.
Our aim is to help you stay medical debt-free, and the intensive negotiation process can take a few months, as our attorneys research every fact of your case and every claim made by your healthcare providers.
In addition to negotiating your medical bills down, lawyers can help you deal with your insurance company, and file any lawsuits against an at-fault party,
If you have been injured, we suggest that you give our experienced team a call, so that they can help you assess any financial help you could be entitled to, or could help you file a lawsuit against the at-fault party.
What Else Can Lawyers Do To Help Me After I Have Been Injured In An Accident?
Negotiating liens and reduced medical service bills aren’t the only benefits that having a personal injury attorney on your side, though. They provide other invaluable legal services that they perform if you have been injured.
Through speaking with the accident victim, they will be able to conduct a legal investigation into the incident that resulted in your injuries. This will enable them to find any parties who could be held legally responsible and assist you in determining whether you have any legal grounds to seek compensation for any damages from the parties involved.
During this investigation, your attorney might discover information by interviewing witnesses, gathering medical records, reviewing police reports, and consulting with experts to establish facts and liability in the case.
After this investigatory phase, the injury lawyer and victim together file a claim against the insurance company (if applicable), at which point, many personal injury claims are resolved successfully.
Your injury lawyer will be able to assess the potential value of your claim based off of the specific circumstances, and their previous case results with similar fact patterns.
The Texas insurance code requires insurance companies not to engage in Bad Faith practices when they are negotiating Insurance claims for personal injury suits.
However, insurance adjusters do represent the interests of their employers rather than that of their employers clients, meaning that they will try to deny or devalue as many claims as possible, therefore reducing the amount of money that their employer has to spend.
If a fair injury settlement can’t be successfully negotiated, then your attorney can pursue a few different legal avenues. They can go through formal litigation, which includes the following steps:
Filing a Complaint
This is the beginning of a lawsuit, where the injured victim files a complaint against the at-fault party in the appropriate court, and names the defendant.
Service of Pre-trial motions
The complaint has to be formally legally served to the defendant. This is done via a summons to appear for a court date.
Filing of Motions Pre-trial
The attorney that is representing the defendant can file motions before the official trial begins. These motions can have a multitude of functions – they might ask the court to rule on the admissibility of certain pieces of evidence, to order the other party to provide certain information, to grant summary judgement, or even to totally dismiss the case, if applicable.
The Official Trial
If the parties are not able to resolve the case in mediation or settlement discussions before the trial begins, then the two opposing parties will participate in the trial process. This means that they will have to formally make arguments, either to a judge or jury, depending on the type of trial.
If there is a jury trial, then the first step of the trial is for both sides to participate in a voir dire process, where the respective sides lawyers will try to determine if any of the jurors would be biased, which would make them unable to render a fair verdict.
Once the jury has been selected, the trial will start.
To kick off the trial, each side begins with an opening statement. Then, witnesses are examined and cross-examined, and other evidence, such as documents, statements, and any forensics, is presented to the jury/judge.
At the conclusion of the trial, the judge or jury will render a verdict. If the case is ruled in the plaintiff’s favor (i.e., the victim), then the judge or jury will calculate the damages, based on their specific circumstances (such as the cost of medical bills, the losses made, and the cost for future treatment of the same conditions).
Enforcement of Judgement
After the court has made a decision has been made about the settlement monies has been made, if the defendant/the insurance company does not provide the compensation awarded, the plaintiff and their legal team might have to take additional steps to ensure that they actually receive the money.
If you find yourself in this situation, you will likely have to ask the court to take further action and enforce the judgement. This can be done through a few different methods.
These include: The writ of execution, which allows a peace officer to take/levy the judgement debtor’s non-expempt property, which is then auctioned with the proceeds being used to pay for the judgement.
The abstract of judgement can also be invoked, which places liens against the defendant’s property, and needs to be filed in the judgement records of every county that the judgement debtor owns land in, or where they might one day own real property.
The lien will have to be paid before any property is sold or ownership transferred. Another method of enforcing the judgement is if a turnover statute is invoked. This is used if the debtor owns assets that can’t be easily levied by a peace officer, or attached with liens.
According to the Civil Practice and Remedies Code 31.002, a trial court can order the defendant to ‘turn over’ nonexempt assets to an officer or court receiver.
Appeals
If one or both of the parties think that the judge made mistakes that significantly impacted the case’s outcome, they are able to appeal the decision. This typically happens in the next level of the courts.
