WTVM Legal Break - Personal Health After an Injury

Now answering your questions about the law
and legal issues. This is Legal Break with attorney Gary Bruce. Maureen Akers here with Gary, thanks so much
for joining us today. Good to be here again, thank you.

We are talking about personal health insurance. So, if you've been injured, should you use
your personal health insurance to help pay for your medical bills? Well in a situation that I'm involved in,
generally when people are injured after a collision, or a fall, or something yes. I mean that's what you have it for. And so there are two terms of art that come
into play Maureen; one is reimbursement, and one is subrogation.

And you'll hear these things, what do they
mean? They mean, if at the end if you prevail, you
may have an obligation to reimburse your insurance company, or TRICARE, or whoever's paying the
bill. So, your insurance- your personal insurance,
really is not to determine whose fault it was, or where there might be a way to collect. I mean there's just so many variables there
you can't predict that. So, the health insurance was paid for, their
premium is paid.

It is there to provide service, or pay for
your services that you need, and then if you do collect, if you do prevail, then you have
to deal with that obligation to reimburse. Yeah, I mean you definitely shouldn't sit
and wait on your health care though, and in a lot of cases: you can't. It's serious enough that you're taken care
of first. Surprisingly, people run into problems going
to see their primary care physician, and other health care providers.

Sometimes he'll say, oh we can't use the
insurance, you have to pay cash, or we don't see you if you've been involved in a motor
vehicle wreck because we don't know how we're going to get paid. The way to get paid is to use the same health
insurance that they've always used. And then, we do have an obligation as lawyers
to deal with that issue at the end. We have to we have fiduciary duty, we have
a legal obligation to deal with reimbursing Medicare, Medicaid, your health insurance,
TRICARE, all of these organizations.

So, does the person get reimbursed by the
insurance company, or no? We're saying that the insurance company just
gets reimbursed if theyre not the ones responsible. Well it depends on what insurance company
youre talking about. So, if you're talking about the liability
insurance company that may pay for your damages, they're not gonna pay for you to go to the
doctor, they don't want you to go to the doctor, they don't want you to be seen, they won't
pay until the end in a lump sum. So, how do you deal with it in the meantime? Hopefully your healthcare provider is submitting
the bills to your personal health insurance carrier, or medical payment coverage, which
we may have through your automobile policy- we've talked about that in the past.

So, there's lots of options and ways to make
sure you utilize everything that's available to you. That's part of what we do: we coordinate your
options, make sure these things are paid for, make sure you get the care. All right very good. So there you go your personal health insurance,
possibly when you've been injured.

Thanks so much for joining us today, Gary,
we look forward to seeing you on the very next Legal Break..