Florida’s workers’ compensation law requires that all hospital, emergency room and ambulance bills that are directly related to, and a result of treatment from, a workplace accident or injury should be paid by your employer’s workers’ compensation insurance company.
Whether they are paid by workers’ compensation, or even sent to workers’ compensation is a different story.
There are times that workers’ compensation accidents are not timely reported by an employer and other times where the workers’ compensation insurance information is not provided by the employer to the medical providers. As experienced workers’ compensation attorneys, we obtain all medical bills and confirm that they are sent to the insurance company for processing and payment. This includes contacting hospitals, doctors and other medical providers to advise them that the injury and resulting care provided was due to a workers’ compensation accident and request that bills not be sent to the injured worker.
Following many workplace accidents, the injured employee will be sent, or taken, to the hospital with no billing information or instructions. When this happens, the bills are assigned to the injured worker rather than the workers’ compensation insurance company. Also, most hospitals do not have just one all encompassing bill. If you are seen at the emergency room, there will likely be bills for the hospital, the emergency room physicians, the radiology department, the pathologist (blood work) and more. When this happens, one provider may be advised of the workers’ compensation billing information, but the other offices are not. One, many or all of the bills go unpaid until they are sent to collections where they are reported to the credit bureaus and your credit takes a beating. Once this happens, trying to repair your credit rating is a nightmare.
IF you have been trauma-hawked from the accident site to a hospital, if you received emergency surgery after your accident or have been admitted to the hospital for several weeks, these bills are not your responsibility. Don’t let your credit take the hit. Make sure the workers’ compensation insurance company pays the bills for which they are responsible under Florida’s workers’ compensation law.
