Handling Hospital Bills after an Auto Accident

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hello everyone, today I want to talk to you about hospital bills and hospital bills that you incur after a car accident. My name is Robert Mansour, and I'm a personal injury lawyer in the Los Angeles area. When you get hospital bills from a personal injury accident where somebody caused harm to you and you got a serious accident, you went to the hospital, you're going to get some bills in the mail. Now, you can't ignore hospital bills. By the way, it's never just hospital bills. It's usually hospital bills. It's usually hospital bills, the emergency room physicians, the imaging center that took x-ray and CT scans of you, etc. It's also the ambulance bill. You're going to start to get several bills from a lot of different facilities and providers. ...Anesthesiologists, for example.

You get all these things in the mail and the temptation might be, "Oh, I don't have to pay this. The responsible party's got to pay it, I don't have to pay it." Yes, the responsible party is responsible for those bills, but they're not going to pay it. It is your responsibility to pay the hospital bills and emergency room bills and the ambulance bill. You might say, "Well, I have health insurance for that." Well, you're still responsible for the co-pays, the deductibles, and all of that. Just because the other party may have admitted fault for the accident still does not absolve you of the responsibility for paying for those bills.  So, how do you pay for those bills?

Well, there's many different options. Number one, if you have health insurance, use that. Have your health insurance pay the hospital bills and the emergency room and the ambulance, etc. Keep in mind that you might have co-pays and co-insurance amounts that you have to pay, and deductibles that you have to meet. Then, keep in mind, that your health insurance company that just paid for all those bills, they have a right to reimbursement for what they paid out in many cases. You have to be very careful not to settle with the responsible party before you figure out whether or not you have to repay your health insurance company.

You also might be able to pay out of your own pocket, so if you don't have health insurance, you can just tell the hospital, "Hey listen, I don't have health insurance, can you treat me as a 'cash' patient?" A lot of providers will give you a discount if you  are paying as a cash patient. Sometimes actually it's less than if you went through your own health insurance. Cash patient you pay out of your own pocket and you keep track of all that.

Finally, some people have something called medical payments coverage. Medical payments coverage is something available under your own auto insurance policy in many cases. In fact, you might have it and not even know it. That basically means that you have health insurance, kind of health insurance, under your automobile policy. How much do you have? You have to check. You can't just assume. Most people have two thousand dollars or five thousand dollars, in some cases, I've seen even more than that. Now, you auto insurance company will then pay for your health care bills and your hospital bills, etc. Keep in mind that your auto insurance company, just like your health insurance, has a right to reimbursement if you recover money from the responsible party.

Ultimately, you will claim all of these things when you bring a claim against the responsible party and their insurance company. The fundamental point for you to understand is that you are responsible for those bills. The hospital has provided a service to you and they expect to be paid. You can't tell them, "Oh, don't bother me - you guys go after the guy who hit me." That's not going to work. Please understand when you get bills in the mail, you get things in the mail from the hospital, from the ambulance, from the emergency room doctors, etc, you can't ignore those bills. You must make sure they get paid or you might be sent to collections or you could be ultimately sued to collect those amounts, so be very very careful and understand that that is your responsibility.

Thank you very much for watching this video. I hope you found it helpful. My name is Robert Mansour, if I can be of further assistance, please feel free to contact my office. Thank you very much.