Personal Injury and Family Law - Hull & Zimmerman

Often when a party is injured in any type of accident, whether it be a car crash or a fall, the injured person does not think to hire an attorney immediately. There is nothing wrong with this concept. However, insurance carriers will often create the belief that an attorney is not necessary. In so doing, many people provide the insurance company with information to which the insurance company is not entitled and could not normally get.

Perhaps the most common example of this abuse is a request from the insurance company for a medical release. Often, under the guise of needing medical information to appropriately evaluate your case, the opposing insurance company will ask you to sign a medical release so that it may obtain your medical records. Normally, the insurance companies simply send you a blank medical release, which they can then copy and utilize to request information from any doctor.

Once this medical release is in their hands, the insurance company will typically use this to obtain information from all doctors that you have seen for any condition in the last ten years. More importantly, insurance companies share information with each other. As such, all the doctors that you have seen through your health insurance company will automatically be known to the opposing insurance company. Your psychiatric records, if you have them, will immediately be disclosed to the opposing insurance company. In fact, it is not unusual for obstetric/gynecological records to be obtained by the insurance company. It doesn’t matter to the insurance company that this information will have nothing to do with the injuries you sustained in an accident.

Attorneys know that the opposing insurance companies are not entitled to medical releases and can’t even get them even as part of a lawsuit. Rather, the insurance company is only entitled to the medical records that have to do with the injuries that you have suffered during the course of the accident. The only time that an insurance company is going to be entitled to information regarding older medical records is if you have suffered similar injuries in the past. Even then, you are only required to give them the past medical records for the similar injuries, not everything!

Simply stated, whenever you are dealing with an insurance company, you must be careful. If the insurance company is not your insurance company, but is another parties, you must be extra careful. If you have doubts about whether or not you should sign documents sent to you by an insurance company, call Hull & Zimmerman. Typically, we will look at the documents and answer your questions for free about how much you should cooperate with the insurance company and what information is appropriate to provide. Most importantly, call some attorney.

As our motto states, “Don’t get hurt twice! Trusting an insurance company can cost you.”