Over the past decade, insurance companies have been working overtime to take away the rights of the average person to recover from injuries received at work or due to the negligence of other people.
Their television commercials are designed to make you think that they will be fair to you and pay all of your bills and lost wages. Many of these commercials are even funny and make you laugh. The reality is far different from the commercials. In fact, the best thing you can do is to not believe any of the insurance company commercials. They are not on your side. They don’t care about you. They are not going to treat you fairly.
Their only goal is to make as big a profit as they can because, after all, they are “for profit corporations.” The largest corporations make billions of dollars per year in profits. In order to be that profitable their adjusters must pay you the least amount of money that they can get away with paying you.
In the beginning, the adjuster will want to take a recorded statement from you. Don’t let them do that. The adjuster has been trained to get you to say things that they will use against you when you try to settle your claim. The adjuster will also come up with all kinds of excuses why you are not entitled to even be paid the full amount of your medical bills.
Most people haven’t had much contact with insurance companies or their adjusters. It is an uphill battle. Many times your own insurance company doesn’t want to do much to help you. Your own adjuster will often tell you that you should just go through the other person’s insurance company to try to get reimbursed for everything. Some of your medical providers might even tell you that your own group health insurance won’t pay your bills because someone else is at fault. Unfortunately, that is not true and ends up costing you money in the long run.
You can try to battle the insurance company on your own. The insurance companies want you to do that because they know that you have probably never tried a case before a jury and you would probably end up receiving nothing. Insurance companies don’t want you to get an attorney because they know it will force them to pay a fair amount of compensation which is more than what they were planning on paying you.
Attorneys who represent people in personal injury or workers compensation claims typically work on a contingency fee basis of 33 1/3% of whatever they recover for personal injury cases and 20% of whatever is in dispute for workers compensation claims plus whatever out of pocket costs that they expend on your behalf. That means that if the attorney doesn’t obtain a recovery for you there would be no fee for their services.
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