I was rear ended while I was stopped at a stop light. After negotiations with the other persons insurance company I hired a lawyer. My lawyer sent me to a chiroprator. The other persons insurance company is now refusing to pay the bill. Also, my lawyer sent me a letter stating that they could no longer represent me (not enough $$ involved). I am now being sued by the Chiropractor. Is there anything I can do so that the insurance company will pay the bill. If the accident was legit and as you have stated and you haven't made false statements or caused other mitigating circumstances that would have impeded the lawsuit then find another lawyer. There are many hungry lawyers out there that would be glad to pick up the case. Insurance companies for the most part will not pay out unless you retain a lawyer regardless of their legal and moral liability.
What makes me question whether you have done something such as admitting fault, lying about the case or signing an agreement with the insurance company without first consulting your attorney is that most attorneys, no matter how successful or busy they are or how little the case may generate will rarely drop a case. Unless your lawyer was just a schmuck.
Also, you may wish to contact your local bar association. You may have a malpractice case against your lawyer if in fact he did cause you to incur debt and then abandoned your case without cause. There are a lot of bad layers out there. The other insurance company probably determined that your chiropractic treatment was not necessary, so refused payment. Since the lawyer wasn't going to get any money, he dumped you. (I'm assuming he was working on contingency.)
You can try small claims court, or another lawyer. Get another lawyer.. My daughter was in a accident too and she went to doctor and lawyer said to sue insurance co . They settled out of court to get car repaired and for Dr. bills . only if you got comprehensive insurance The short answer to your question is: To make the insurance company pay your bill, you will have to file suit against the person who rear-ended you. However, if you have med-pay coverage on your car insurance policy, or on the car insurance policies of any relative who lives with you, then those policies may pay the chiropractor's bill, also. Additionally, if you sue the driver who hit you, the chiropractor will hold off on getting paid until after the case. You will have to be on good terms with the chiropractor, as you will need him or her to explain your injuries to the jury. Let me elaborate on how you found yourself in this situation, and why:
You were injured due to the other driver's negligence, and through no fault of your own. This is what we attorneys refer to as "clear liablity." That's good for your case. However, judging from your description of the situation, I can guess that your case is what the insurance industry referes to as a "MIST case." MIST stands for Minor Impact Soft Tissue. In other words, there's very little visible damage to your car, and you were diagnosed with what amounts to whiplash. Therefore, your case is the most difficult type of personal injury case to win at trial.
Here's why: Back in the 80s, the insurance industry realized that the vast majority of money they were paying out every year was not to wrongful death claims or to people who were paralyzed, etc. Most of the money was going to the accumulated millions and millions of whiplash claims all over the country. So, they decided to declare war on the smaller claims, to save themselves some money. They have systematically offered lower and lower settlement offers on these cases over the last 20 years or so. Now it's gotten so bad that many of the insurance companies deny the claims outright. They attempt to justify the denial by claiming (falsely) that there is a direct link between property damage to the vehicle and personal injury to the person. In other words, they will tell you that if the car hardly looks damaged, then the occupants of the car couldn't have been hurt. This is a HUGE LIE, and they know it. But they very often win at trial because of three things: 1. Unfortunately, most people believe this lie. It's a very common misconception, and it's presented as "common sense." Contrary to this "common sense" there is actually no link at all between personal injury and property damage in rear-end collisions (I'll mention a bit more on this below). But because of how the rules at trial work, it's very difficult to present evidence explaining that this is a lie to the jury, without spending lots of money on an expert witness to explain it to them. 2. The insurance industry is the richest lobbying group on Earth, and has spent billions to buy off politicans to lie to the American people about "greedy trial lawyers" ruining the legal system and the need for "tort reform.." This smear campaign actually has most of America hating the very attorneys who are fighting for the rights of the individual (like you) who is getting screwed over by the huge corporations. They actually hate their own champions of justice! It's disgusting! Consequently, most juries start a trial assuming that the injured victim is really a lying con artist, and instead of the person that hit you being on the defensive, you end up having to defend yourself. 3. Because of how the legal system works, we never get to tell the jury that an insurance company is even involved. So, as far as the jury knows, you're suing the 16 year old kid or little old lady or whoever actually hit you, and the jury wrongly believes that the little old lady will personally have to pay you the money you're asking for, instead of a multibillion dollar insurance company paying for it. The attorney sitting at trial next to the little old lady is an employee of the insurance company as well. He or she is typically a very smart, very slick, very expensive and experienced attorney, who will dress like a good 'ol boy and try to make you look like a faker.
Their entire defense will be to blow up huge pictures of the bumper of your car, and ask the jury "if the car wasn't damaged, how could she (or he) have been hurt?" And most of the time, the jury will buy it. And even in the cases where we can convince the jury that you were actaully hurt, it was still "only whiplash" in the jury's minds. Meaning that they'll probably award you the medical bills, plus a couple thousand dollars for your pain and suffering.
That's why your attorney dropped the case. Because he didn't want to take on the hardest fight in law, with the entire deck stacked against him, for the smallest payout of any type of personal injury case. And the insurance company knows it. They know that very few attorneys will fight this, and very few injured people will either. Even the ones who start to fight it will probably give up and settle for a very small settlement amount before the case actually gets to trial. It's a great injustice. There are a few attorneys in every city who are tilting at windmills and fighting this fight. I'm one of them.
To those who may have read this but who actually believe that property damage is linked to personal injury, I invite you to go to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration's website, at www.nhtsa.dot.gov/cars/problems/studies/... There you will see a sentence in bold script, which says that a bumper "is not a safety feature intended to prevent or mitigate injury severity to occupants in the passenger cars." You will also see the answer to the question "Is there a way to determine how fast a car was going during a rear end crash based on the damaged bumper(s)?" and the answser, in part, reads "No...Many parameters, such as vehicle masses, the pre-impact velocity of both vehicles, impact angles, crush resistance, metallurgical fatigue, etc., affect how the bumpers behave during an impact. Each crash must be analyzed with respect to all of the parameters before an estimate can be made." So, we cannot tell how fast the cars were going by looking at pictures of the bumper, and bumpers don't protect people from injury. Furthermore the Society of Automotive Engineers is a world-wide and greatly respected group. They are neutral on these issues, and are strictly a scientific community. Anyone interested in the truth is invited to go to their website and order a copy of a scientific paper published by them entitled "Lack of Relationship Between Vehicle Damage and Occupant Injury." The title says it all. And lastly, Claims Magazine is an insurance industry trade magazine. There was an article in the November 2003 issue written by the CEO of a biomechanical engineering firm. The thrust of the article was to warn insurance adjusters that there is now "overwhelming scientific evidence" that there is no relationship between property damage and personal injury. If you still think that you can tell the extent of someone's injuries by looking at pictures of their bumper, then answer this question: The next time you get into a car crash, are you going to have your injuries diagnosed by a doctor, or are you just going to pick some people at random off the street, show them a picture of your car, and ask them to diagnose your injuries based on that? Because the insurance industry is arguing that that's what you should do. |
