How Will You Pay Your Medical Expenses After An Accident?

Immediately after your accident, you will understandably have a lot of concerns and questions. Your car may be damaged, and you may be concerned about your work or how you will pay your bills. But there’s one thing that you will probably be most concerned about: How are you going to pay for the medical treatment that you need to heal from your injuries?

There are a number of ways to do this, and many of them can and will be coordinated by and with your injury attorney.

PIP After a Car Accident

The first step, if you are in a car accident, is to use your own personal injury protection (PIP) to pay your medical bills. This is part of your car insurance; your doctor will likely understand how to bill your PIP insurer for your medical bills.

PIP isn’t perfect; it pays about 80% of your medical bills minus any deductible that you have, up to a maximum of $10,000. You can use your own, private health insurance for the other 20% and the deductible, but you must use your own PIP for the initial $10,000. You don’t have to sue anyone, or show anybody was liable for your accident, to use your PIP coverage.

You may also have (or want to get on your insurance policy, if you haven’t yet been in an accident) what is known as Medpay coverage. Medpay will pay whatever PIP doesn’t pay, and can expand and extend the $10,000 PIP maximum.

Other Sources

If you are not in an accident, you may still have some options. You can use whatever insurance you would normally use for medical care. This may be your own insurance carrier, Medicaid or Medicare, or some other source.

If you were injured at work, you can and should make a workers’ compensation claim, which will pay for your medical expenses.

If you have no other real options, you may also be able to get your doctors to treat you and then wait until later to be paid. They often will do this. You would agree to pay them from any settlement or verdict that you eventually receive, and in return, they treat you and they won’t send you to collections or try to collect the balance.

Subrogation Liens

One thing to be aware of when you use private health insurance, or government assistance is that they often may want to be paid back at least some of the medical expenses that they paid, when and if you get a settlement or verdict. Often, your injury attorney can negotiate to try to reduce the amount that you have to pay back to them. If for some reason you don’t get any money from your case, you won’t have to pay them back anything.

Call the West Palm Beach personal injury attorneys at Pike & Lustig today for answers to the questions you have after any kind of accident.

Sources:

wallethub.com/answers/ci/medical-payments-coverage-florida-2140762782/

healthadvantage-hmo.com/members/employer-coverage/member-rights/subrogation#:~:text=In%20health%20insurance%2C%20subrogation%20refers,for%20payment%20of%20medical%20care