How do medical expenses relate to a personal injury claim
Medical expenses are one of the blanks that a jury will fill in at trial as to the damages that were caused. It will ask for past medical expenses and it will have a blank and future medical expenses and there will be a blank for them to fill in the dollar amount. Many times doctors and chiropractors who you go to for treatment will not treat you when they find out there has been a car accident. The reason they do this is because they don't want to testify. What happens is when a doctor treats you because you have had a car accident, we as lawyers have to prove up your medical expenses, we as lawyers have to prove up your damages, and we need the doctors to do that. The doctors don't want to be troubled with that, so there are certain doctors that will handle car accident cases and certain doctors that won’t.
Letter of Protection
So you have been in an accident and you want to get treatment, and you want to know if you should go and get treatment. The answer is yes; you get treatment immediately. If you have health insurance use that insurance to go ahead and get treatment. If you don't have health insurance, we have had many clients come up to us and say, I don’t have health insurance, what do I do? We can go ahead and talk to a doctor that you want to go to and get what is called a letter of protection, LOP which stands for letter of protection. What that does, is it tells the doctor that if and when we get a recovery on your claim, we guarantee as the attorney that we are going to pay them back out of your settlement. We know some of those doctors who will do that treatment. If you have been in an accident and don’t have health insurance and can’t find a doctor, then give us a call, we will see if we can help you out.
