When you get hurt whether it be at work or in an accident, it can be devastating, and not just because of the injury. While some injuries are minor enough that you might be out for as few as a couple of days, some injuries can leave you laid up and without pay for weeks or even months. During those times, not only aren’t you bringing home a paycheck, but you are accruing expensive medical bills as well. For those incidents, the insurance companies should be there to protect you.
By Minnesota state law, there are a variety of different mandatory insurances in place to help protect people when they get hurt from worker’s comp to automotive insurance. Unfortunately, any insurance company can be a real headache to work around. One of the biggest headaches is the constant pestering by insurance companies to go visit new doctors. They ask you to go to another medical exam just to “make sure” the severity of the injury, and you comply because you really need that insurance payout to get by.
Stop it.
Just stop it. You don’t have to keep going to the doctors that your insurance company tells you to go to. You are under no obligation to do so up until a certain point, and obliging them is actually just hurting you.
Why Don’t You Have to Go to Your Insurance Company’s Doctors?
The technical term that is used when your insurance company asks you to go to a doctor of their choosing is an “independent medical exam.” They use this maneuver to send you to doctors that, while can’t legally be paid to say what the insurance company wants them to say, have had a history of agreeing with them in the past. This means if your doctor says that you have a pretty severe back injury, their doctors might say that it is not quite as bad.
This can be used to lower the payout of your insurance which can result in the coverage not actually covering all of your medical bills. This means that you can be stuck with a bigger portion of the bill, and you definitely don’t want that.
When Do You Have to Comply?
There is only one circumstance when you will have to comply with an insurance company’s request for an independent medical exam, and that is if you case gets taken to court. When you go to court, you will have to comply with court rules or risk your case getting dismissed and you getting nothing. Court rules state that the insurance company can request an independent medical exam per each injury. If you have one injury, you will only need to see one specialist on their request. For multiple injuries, it will be more doctors.
However, they can’t just keep sending you to doctors until they get a favorable result. They get one IME request per injury. Only if the case goes on for a prolonged amount of time where the status of your injury may have changed would they be able to request you go to the doctor again.
With independent medical exams and overly suspicious insurance companies, filing a claim can be a difficult route to handle. You shouldn’t have to be overwhelmed by legal paper work when you are trying so hard to heal. For those times, it is worthwhile to invest in a solid attorney that can help competently handle your claim for you to assure that you get every single penny that you deserve for your injury. For those times, contact us. The Meshbesher Law Firm specializes in personal injury claims so you can focus on healing while we focus on winning.
