Insurance & Personal Injury Attorney in St Paul, Minnesota

Claims and Insurance

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If your medical bills were paid by insurance, you definitely still have a claim. Your claim for the medical bills will – continues to exist because it’s your claim, not the insurance company’s claim.

It’s different in other states. Minnesota, for example, we’re forbidden from naming insurance companies even though they’re really interested parties in cases. In Wisconsin, 25 miles east of here, you are required to name the insurance company. Either case, if you do it wrong, you might be thrown outta court. In any case, if your medical bills are paid, you still have a claim, presumably, if you have permanent injury, if you have pain and suffering, scarring, whatever like that, and you, in Minnesota, make the claim for the medical bills that have been paid by others.

Again, those others have a subrogation right. If money goes from the ____ fees to the injured party, the payor of the medical bills has their handout in between saying, “I want mine back,” and then the question then becomes do they get 100 cents of the dollar if the injured party has an argument that they weren’t fully compensated? It used to be in Minnesota that if the injured party wasn’t fully compensated, they settle their claim for maybe a quarter of what it was worth because there were questions about liability or timing or whatever, and the insurer, the payor of the medical bills, got none of it. The tendency nowadays is they’re writing contracts where they wanna get all of it. Most cases, they’re somewhere in between. You argue that your client took $0.25 on the dollar because of iffy liability issues and to settle things. Now, the insurer should take $0.25 on the dollar, and that’s often what happens.

Minneapolis personal injury lawyer Bill Tilton discusses how insurance factors into medical malpractice claims.

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