Hiring An Alabama Injury Lawyer To Protect A Settlement From Your Health Insurance Provider
When you have been involved in an accident, the last thing you are worried about
is protecting a potential settlement from your health insurance provider. Most people do not have the faintest idea this could be an issue, which is why its best to contact an Alabama injury lawyer immediately following your accident.Health Maintenance Organizations (better known as HMOs) have contracted large discounts with hospitals and doctors offices and are reluctant to pay many claims. Due to the discounts placed on them, health care providers are scraping for every penny they can get their hands on to recover costs. Even if this means going further than collecting what a patient owes them and laying claim to a larger piece of a patients settlement.
Make a list of a few potential Alabama personal injury attorneys and arrange for initial consultation meetings (usually these are free), ask all the questions mentioned above and for an estimated cost; then make your decision on which lawyer you feel comfortable hiring. The key is to ask the right questions. A good attorney will communicate the process to you up front and answer any questions you may have about your Alabama personal injury attorney.
Heres how it works and why it can potentially affect your settlement:
Health care insurance companies have contracts with hospitals and doctors offices to pay a certain percentage or fixed amount of a service provided by the health care giver (i.e. hospitals and clinics). Let us provide a simple example to explain. Say a hospital charges $200 for an x-ray. The insurer may contract to cap their expense at $100 for this service. The insurer may also have contracted with the patient or customer to pay 75 percent of the health care providers costs. That would mean the insurer would only owe the hospital $75 (the 75 percent), and the patient would owe the remaining $25 to the hospital for the remaining fixed cost of $100. So who then covers the remaining $100 left for the $200 x-ray costs? No one. The contract between the hospital and health care insurer resets the price of the x-ray to $100, and essentially the hospital is out $100.
When youve been injured in a serious accident, the medical costs tend to get very high, and the amount you owe the hospital can add up quickly. Hospitals have the right to collect the money owed to them that is left over after the health care insurer pays them their contracted fixed fee or percentage. However, the hospitals may also try to bill you for the difference between what your insurer is contracted to pay and what the hospital actually charges (the $100 in our example).
Due to these types of claims made by health insurance companies, its best to contact an Alabama injury lawyer immediately after the accident. These types of injuries can involve complex litigation and requires an experienced Alabama injury lawyer who can provide information on fair compensation and make sure you are not taken advantage of.
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