How to Dispute Hospital Bills Before You Get Sued

How Does Your Hospital Bill Get Paid After a Motorcycle Accident?

If you have been injured in a motorcycle accident, you may start receiving hospital bills even if you have medical insurance.

After your motorcycle accident, you’ll go home from the hospital ER in pain. But you’ll be in real pain when you receive a shocking Emergency Room bill for $28,000!

Hospitals know to bill No-Fault for car accidents. But hospitals and the doctors at the hospital frequently bill the wrong insurance company because they don’t know that in New York, motorcycle accidents are different than car accidents.

Hospitals often don’t know that New York law requires the hospital to bill your health insurance company when you are treated for injuries from a motorcycle accident.

When the hospital sends their bill to the No-Fault insurance company, No-Fault will usually ignore it. No-Fault won’t even deny the bill because they don’t have to. Eventually, when the hospital doesn’t get paid, they start sending bills to you.

If you don’t pay the hospital bill, the hospital may file a lawsuit, and if you don’t hire a lawyer to defend you, the hospital’s lawyers will look to garnish your wages. But that doesn’t have to happen!

We will make sure that your hospital bills get paid by the right insurance company so you don’t become responsible to pay the bills. If the hospital has already started billing you for treatment, we can fix the problem.

If you are responsible to pay the hospital bills because you don’t have health insurance, we may be able to arrange to pay it from your settlement money. If the driver who caused your motorcycle accident has enough insurance, we will make the driver’s insurance pay you for your medical bills. We will then substantially reduce your hospital bills.

We Will Stop Collections for Your Hospital Bill

We will immediately send a letter to the collection agency advising the collection agency that we represent you and to stop contacting you.

If you start receiving letters and calls from a collection agency for the hospital, we will immediately send a letter to the collection agency advising that we represent you and to stop contacting you. They will not be allowed to contact you again.

If you have health insurance, we’ll get your hospital bill paid. If you do not have health insurance, we’ll attempt to get them to agree to wait until your case is settled to get paid.

How We Will Reduce Your Hospital Bills

We can have your hospital bills reviewed by a hospital bill review service to remove fraudulent charges, unnecessary charges, and overcharges. We don’t charge you a legal fee for this. You just pay the small cost of the medical billing review service at the end of your case out of your settlement money which in the example below was only $500.

See the hospital bill cost review report we used to reduce the hospital bill for our motorcycle accident client and the settlement letter for the example case below.

Example of a hospital bill we reduced:

Hospital: NYU Winthrop University Hospital
Collection Agency: POM Recoveries
Amount of ER Hospital Bill: $6,676.99
The Report of Hospital Bill Review showed the reasonable amount to be: $1,667.20
Settlement with the collection agency: $1,152
Motorcycle accident case settled for our client: $100,000
Legal Fee: $33,333.33
Amount our client received after legal fee: $66,666.67
Amount our client would have received if the hospital bill was paid: $59,989.68
Cost of Hospital Bill Review Service: $500
Amount our client received because the hospital bill was reduced: $65,014.67
Amount We Saved Our Client: $5,024.99

What Not to Do About Hospital Bills After a Motorcycle Accident

1. Don’t limp home to avoid a bill for going to the hospital! Go to the hospital, call us, and we’ll get your hospital bill paid.
2. Don’t ignore hospital bills. Tell your accident lawyer immediately.
3. If you get collection letters from the hospital, tell your accident lawyer immediately.
4. If you are served with lawsuit papers from the hospital, tell your accident lawyer immediately!

Why Going Home to Avoid a Hospital Bill Is a Bad Idea

We often have motorcycle accident clients who refuse to go to the hospital by ambulance and instead go home from the accident. This is a bad idea because:

1. At the motorcycle accident scene, you often won’t know how seriously injured you are because it can take up to 48 hours for the pain to begin. Delaying diagnosis and treatment can cause more serious injuries and even death.
2. Your motorcycle accident case is worth more money and can settle faster if you go to the hospital by ambulance from the accident scene. We can deal with the hospital bill later, and the driver who caused your accident will probably be responsible to pay it.
3. Many motorcyclists have injuries more serious than they thought and have to go to the hospital anyway, either later that day or the next day.
4. You’ll get into the hospital immediately when the ambulance brings you in. If you go on your own, you can sit in the waiting room for as long as 5-8 hours or more!

Why Hospital Bills Are Confusing

You may receive several different types of hospital bills

• Summary bill
• Itemized bill
• Billing statement

You may receive different hospital bills from different billers

If you were only in the Emergency Room

• The hospital bill will include the use of the emergency room and nursing services.
• The radiology department may submit its own bill for X-rays and CT scans.
• Doctors in the Emergency Room will each submit their own bill for physician services.*
• You may receive an ambulance bill from the ambulance service.

If you were admitted to the hospital

• The hospital bill usually includes the ER room, room, food, nursing services, pharmacy, and operating room expenses. It may also include laboratory fees.
• The radiology department will often submit its own bill for X-rays and CT scans.
• Doctors who provide treatment will submit their own bills for physician services.*

*You may receive many separate invoices from hospital physicians like emergency room physicians, anesthesiologists, pathologists, and radiologists. In addition to the cost of the X-ray or CT scan, the radiologist who reads your X-ray will send a bill for physician services for reading the scan.

Outpatient billing

After you leave the hospital, you may see a doctor at a private office, or you may go back to the hospital clinic to see a doctor.

If you see a doctor at the hospital after you have left the hospital, the hospital will send you a separate bill for outpatient billing for physician services at the time of your appointment.

You may also receive separate invoices for diagnostic tests, radiology, and lab fees.

Homecare

If you need care at home after release from the hospital, you will receive a separate bill for services and/or products provided in the home, including visiting nurses, home health aide, physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapist or social worker, IV therapy and home medical equipment.

Why you don’t know what the hospital is billing you for

The hospital only sends you a Summary bill. They won’t send you an Itemized bill unless you request it.

Even when you request it, they usually just send you another copy of the Summary bill. This happens to us all the time. The hospital doesn’t want you to see the Itemized bill because that’s when you’ll find out what they are really charging you for!

What hospitals don’t want you to see in their itemized bill

Hospitals are very creative with their billing and may charge fraudulent fees. The emergency room bill is sometimes reasonable but usually is not.

Sometimes, we see a hospital billing $1,100 for the emergency room, but we often see emergency room bills as much as $6,000-$28,000 when they should have been $1,100.

Hospital bills get really interesting when you are admitted. If you look at your itemized hospital bill, you may find that you have been charged hundreds of dollars of fraudulent charges for a disposable mucus recovery device (box of tissues) and/or thermal therapy (a bag of ice); oral administration fee (a nurse handing you pills); Etc.

What to Do When You Receive Hospital Bills

If you haven’t been injured in an accident and do not have an accident attorney, see Medical & Hospital Billing Errors at HURT911®

If you have been injured in a motorcycle accident, call a motorcycle lawyer immediately and ask if the lawyer will represent you for your hospital bill. Motorcycle lawyers know how to properly protect your rights. General personal injury lawyers are not familiar with hospital and medical billing after a motorcycle accident.

If we are representing you for your injuries, we will make sure that all collection efforts are stopped, and if you are sued, we will represent you. We will have your hospital bill reviewed to negotiate a reduction. Call us now 7 days/nights, for a free consultation at 1-800-HURT-911 | 1-800-487-8911.

If you have been injured in a motorcycle accident or any other type of accident, make sure your accident attorney knows that you are being billed by the hospital.

Why you should tell your motorcycle accident lawyer about collection letters even if you have insurance

This is an example of what can happen when you don’t tell your accident lawyer that the hospital is sending you collection letters or suing you.

Our client broke a rib in a motorcycle accident and was taken to Winthrop Hospital by ambulance. The emergency room bill was $28,000, but our client had health insurance, so he didn’t have to pay for the bill.

Unfortunately, the hospital was trying to bill his “no-fault” insurance for over a year, but motorcyclists in New York do not have no-fault insurance, so the hospital should have been billing his regular health insurance provided by his employer.

Our client ignored requests from the hospital to provide his insurance information and then later ignored letters from the hospital’s collection agency.

Eventually, the hospital filed a lawsuit against our client, but our client never responded to the lawsuit and never notified us. The hospital got a default judgment against our client and garnished his salary. He didn’t even know the money was taken out of his checking account, and checks for his car and apartment bounced. That’s when our client notified us!

We submitted his hospital bill to his health insurance company, but they denied it because it was submitted too late.

Because our client was personally served with the hospital lawsuit papers, we could not reopen the lawsuit, and the hospital was unwilling to negotiate the $28,000 hospital bill. The best we could do was to get the hospital to unfreeze his checking account and agree to wait until his motorcycle accident case was settled.

If our client had notified us of the collection letters, we could have stopped those letters, and they probably would not have filed a lawsuit. Even if they did file a lawsuit, we could have fought it for him. We probably would have been able to settle the hospital bill for as little as $1,600 paid out of our client’s motorcycle accident settlement if our client had notified us of the collection letters.

What if You Don’t Have Money to Pay Doctor Bills For Medical Treatment After the Hospital?

If you have a motorcycle accident and don’t have medical insurance, that’s not a problem. We can ask your doctor to bill you on a “lien.”

A lien means that the doctor will get paid at the end of your accident case from your settlement money, and you won’t have to pay the medical bills if you don’t get money from your motorcycle accident case settlement.

You’ll be able to get the medical treatment you need, and you won’t have to worry about making payments or collection letters!

If your doctor doesn’t accept liens, we can give you the names of doctors near you who do accept liens. Almost every private radiology facility accepts liens for MRIs and other diagnostic tests.

But what can you do if you were injured in a motorcycle accident that didn’t involve another vehicle or the motorcycle accident was your fault and you don’t have health insurance Medicare or Medicaid?

You must immediately apply for Medicaid if you qualify. Medicaid will pay medical bills 90 days old retroactively. Also, see What to Do if You Can’t Afford Medical Treatment