Why you should NEVER send your medical bills to the insurance company after a car accident:

If another driver injures you, his insurance company might ask you for your medical records related to the accident. While it may seem perfectly innocuous, even necessary to provide these documents to the insurance carrier, do not. You see, the insurance carrier does not want your medical bills in order to pay you a fair amount. Instead, they want an opportunity to dig through your medical records to find an excuse not to pay you a fair amount.

In this article, we'll explain why you should not comply with an insurance adjusters request to provide them with anything related to your medical history.

Questions Answered on This Page:

• Why wouldn't I want to send my medical bills to the insurance carrier?
• What happens if I send my medical bills to the claims adjuster?
• What's the best way to make sure I recover the cost of my medical expenses?

Why the insurance carriers want your medical records.

Your medical records will form some of the most important evidence in your lawsuit against the driver who hit you. Records from doctors, nurses, and EMTs are the best way to reliably prove the harm done to you.

The insurance company knows this. If you send your medical records to the other driver's insurance company, you are taking risks. The primary risk is that you're giving the insurance company's own in-house doctors unfettered access to your confidential information. The reason insurance carrier have these doctors on staff is so they can pick apart a person's medical records and criticize the procedures that were performed and the amounts charges for the procedures.

An adjuster would love nothing more than to take these records, misconstrue them, and try to bully you into a settlement for pennies on the dollar. Don't give them that chance.

Another reason insurance companies ask you for your medical records is trickier. If the other driver's insurance company asks you for records and you send them yourself, you are showing the insurance company you do not have an attorney and, frankly, that you do not know what you're doing.

What do we mean by this? The way that attorneys request medical records is very particular. In order for your medical records to be admissible in courts, they must be processed in just the right fashion. When an unrepresented injury claimant gets their own medical records and provides them to the insurance carrier, they are unwittingly telling the insurance carrier, "As you can see, I don't know the proper way to request my medical records." To the insurance carrier, this is a telltale sign that they shouldn't be afraid of you in the court room. After all, if you're unfamiliar with this basic procedural formality, they figure their attorneys can walk all over you at trial. This makes them more likely to play hardball with you.

Insurers make fair offers to injury victims only when those insurers are forced to, and when you do not have a lawyer, you cannot force insurers to do anything. You are at their mercy. Instead, an experienced car accident injury lawyer is best qualified to make the important decisions about your records.

Medical authorizations.

Above we mention that you shouldn't send the insurance carrier your medical records. Likewise, you should not provide to them a medical record authorization form. These authorizations are called many different things: sometimes "HIPAA" authorizations, meaning they comply with a federal law known as the Health Insurance Protection and Accountability Act of 1996. If you sign a medical records authorization, a healthcare records authorization, a HIPAA authorization or anything else like that, you risk the insurance company getting your full medical records, even those unrelated to the accident.

The bottom line: you need an attorney between your medical records and the insurance company

Your attorney is the one who should make the decisions about any documents to turn over to anyone when it comes to your injury. Let the attorneys at Grossman Law Offices bring over 25 years of experience to work for you and your loved ones. Call Grossman Law Offices at (855) 326-0000 to visit with our staff members right now. We have experienced attorneys ready to speak with you 24/7.

Feel free to click on any of the links below to get more info on car insurance:

• The Importance of Investigating all Possible Claims After a Fatal Car Crash
• Holding Drivers Accountable for Accidents Caused by Running a Stoplight
• What Evidence Is Used to Prove Your Car Crash Injury Claim?