Should I Submit my Accident-Related Medical Bills to my Health Insurance Company?

Attorney Tyson Mutrux describes in this video whether you should Submit your Accident-Related Medical Bills to your Health Insurance Company.

Hi, Tyson Mutrux here with the Mutrux Law Firm. Today I’m answering one of the questions that I get most frequently, and that is, “Should I submit my accident related bills to my health insurance company?” The answer to that question is, yes. That’s for a few reasons.

One, the auto insurer is not going to pay your medical bills directly. They are going to pay that as part of the entire settlement. So, it could take months, if not years, to actually pay those balances. If the case is pending for a long time, you’re going to get notices in the mail, and we’re going to get notices in the mail, even collection notices sometimes, E.R. providers, even your primary care physician sometimes saying, “Hey, we need payment.” So, you want to make sure that you submit those right away to your health insurance.

Also, there are sometimes deadlines that if you miss the deadlines and if you don’t submit them in a reasonable amount of time, they won’t pay at all. So you want to make sure that you submit those right away after the bills are incurred.

The other reason is, is that the health insurance get a deep discount for what they pay. So, sometimes they’ll pay 10/15 cents on the dollar, whereas if you were to pay that out of your settlement you’re going to pay 50-75 cents on the dollar. That’s a huge difference and what that does is, it doesn’t put more money in our pockets, it puts more money in your pockets. So that’s a big way of increasing the amount of recovery for your claim.

Third is, even if your health insurer has some sort of segregation rights, let’s say it’s an ERISA lien (and we cover ERISA liens in another video), you still benefit from that discount because they’re still paying that heavily discounted rate. So even if you have to pay your health insurance segregation back, you’re still getting that benefit of that discount.