If you have a compensable workers’ compensation case then you should not be getting medical bills and you should call an experienced Broward County workers’ compensation attorney right away.
At the Law Offices of Franks, Koenig & Neuwelt we have more than 80 years combined experience helping injured workers receive medical care, lost wages and more. We have battled the insurance companies and medical providers who seek to double dip by getting paid by both work comp and injured workers.
When injured at work in Florida, your employer’s workers’ compensation carrier or insurance company is supposed to send you to a medical provider. The medical provider agrees to provide care in exchange for billing the work comp insurance company, but at a reduced rate. This is called a fee schedule. There is an agreement between the doctor, MRI facility, surgery center, etc. for exactly how much everything costs. It is always reduced, and will be much less than what you would pay for medical care if just paying cash or even with a group health plan. Our work injury lawyers in Broward County make sure that your bills are paid correctly by the carrier, and not by you.
By agreeing to accept the fee schedule, medical providers agree that they are not allowed to collect the difference between what they would normally bill and what they get from the fee schedule. For example, if a radiologist would charge $200.00 for an x-ray and $100.00 to review the film, costing $300.00 total, under the Florida work comp fee schedule they would agree to only receive $100.00.They then have to eat the $200.00 difference. If you ask what happens to the $200.00 difference, the answer is nothing. They don’t get paid.
However, what many medical providers or their billing offices will do is to send the injured worker a bill for payment of the difference. This type of action is not only in violation of the fee schedule agreement but also potentially illegal and actionable. Our Broward County work injury compensation lawyers make sure that underhanded medical providers can’t stick you with the bill, and if they do we fight them to make sure they are held responsible.
Sometimes injured workers will be taken to a hospital or emergency room after a trauma or accident. When you think about this type of facility, you may normally imagine it as one big entity that would send you one master bill. But it isn’t always that way. In fact, most hospitals are set up with independent medical providers that generate their own separate and distinct medical bills. So after being injured and taken to your local hospital, you may have bills from the Emergency Room, the attending physician, radiology, pathology and more. When these bills are sent out, billing offices look to the intake to see who the responsible party is. If the information is not complete, or fails to include the employer’s information (which happens many times when an employer drops off an injured employee and leaves to avoid responsibility), the medical providers simply bill the injured worker without digging any deeper.
Further, ambulance and Trauma Hawk services are usually provided by a local municipality, the town or city or county where you were injured. Often, these bills are not sent out for weeks or months after the injury and they do not take any information other than the injured party’s name and address.
If you have been hurt at work, you should not have to pay for medical care and services out of our pocket. – If you have received a medical bill which you do not feel you should have to pay, contact one of the dedicated Broward County work injury compensation lawyers at the Law Offices of Franks, Koenig & Neuwelt today.