Emergency room visits are expensive, and the kinds of ER trips that come from accidents are usually worse. The price of an ER visit has more than doubled in cost over the last 15 years, outpacing inflation. Even if you have good insurance, out-of-pocket costs like copays, deductibles, and out-of-network fees can wreck you financially.
After a motorcycle crash, it can feel like the biggest threat is the pile of medical bills. Even if someone else was at fault for your injuries and you get compensation, it feels like a guess to even calculate what your future medical expenses might be. When you work with a personal injury lawyer, it is important to ensure that your claim can keep up with the rising cost of emergency medical care.
Why Are Emergency Medical Costs Constantly Rising?
Hospitals often charge you a fee just for showing up in the ER. You don’t even have to get any medical care. If your accident required a trauma team for treatment, the activation fees for the trauma team can run in the tens of thousands of dollars.
Accidents involve injuries that typically require imaging. A CT scan or an MRI can easily ring up several thousand more dollars in debt. Did they bring in a specialist, an anesthesiologist, or a specific type of nurse? That goes on the bill.
Likewise, medical operations often use chargemasters. These are internal price lists. Worse, they stay internal, so you never get a clear idea of what the pricing even is. The fees can vary dramatically between hospitals, but the lack of transparency means you’ll never know why going to one hospital might cost more than another.
Ambulance services add thousands more to the cost. A ground ambulance can easily tag a couple thousand more dollars onto your bill. Air ambulance service runs in the tens of thousands.
Financial Impact
High-deductible health plans are among the most common in the U.S. They now cover more than 50% of employer-sponsored workers, with deductibles north of $1,500 for individuals and $3,000 for families. More worrying, the tens of millions of uninsured Americans suffer the full chargemaster rates. This is because the insurers have deals in place. Likewise, they have leverage to negotiate whenever there are differences. The uninsured sit there looking at medical bills that run higher than the price of a new vehicle.
More than 100 million Americans carry some amount of medical debt, and ER visits are the biggest contributor. Medical debt can lead to collection actions, credit reporting, wage garnishments, and even bankruptcy.
Once you’re done with the emergency room, you are probably not done. Orthopedic visits, prescriptions, and physical therapy can keep the bill running for medical care for months or years after a trip to the ER.
All this happens at a time when you may be missing work. With no paycheck coming in, the financial impact keeps getting worse.
Delayed-onset injuries are another problem. A concussion or a soft tissue injury may not be evident during your initial ER visit. However, it could send you back to the emergency room days or weeks later. These recurring problems rack up more bills and also keep people away from their jobs.
Making Sense of ER Costs Following a Motorcycle Accident
The first order of business is to organize your medical bills. You want to get a larger, solid box or folder that allows you to organize bills across types, senders, and dates. Whether you intend to file an injury claim or not, act like that’s where things are headed. Even if you think your health is good and will stay good, plan as if it could get worse.
Identify any disputable bills. By some estimates, 80% of medical bills contain at least one accounting mistake. Get to know the hospital’s billing department and learn about its hardship programs, too.
Learn about your insurance rights. Consider ways to spread coverage across your health and auto insurance. Look at how the at-fault party might pay, too. Likewise, know the rules in your state for dealing with a rejected insurance claim.
Also, learn about your insurer’s rights. Particularly, insurers often have the right to claw back expenses they paid if you successfully get damages from an at-fault party.
Even if you don’t think someone else is at fault in your accident, explore the possibility. First, this is one of the more straightforward ways to address larger medical bills. Second, it is your right to seek compensation for your injuries.
Many injury attorneys operate on a contingency basis. This means they don’t get paid unless they get money for you. This can keep legal fees from becoming one more problem on the financial pile.
Also, many injury law offices offer free or low-cost initial consultations to provide guidance for motorcycle accident victims. This gives you a certain amount of time to discuss your case, hear professional advice, and decide how you might want to proceed.
Rising emergency room costs in the U.S. make every accident feel worse than it already is. Victims of accidents should never assume it’s on them to pay these expenses. A personal injury lawyer can help you make sense of your case. They can provide an unbiased sense of how likely you are to get compensation.
You can get a better understanding of your state’s laws, too. Learn how long you have to file a claim and what you have to present to the other side to meet the thresholds for bringing a case. Also, you can explore how necessary it might be to take the matter to court. Protect your rights by understanding what you’re up against with ER bills following an accident.
