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While the insurance system in the U.S. is often criticized, it exists for an important reason. Insurance is there to prevent financial ruin after you experience some type of disaster.

For example, if you are seriously hurt at work, you could require hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical care and miss weeks or months of work. Insurance prevents you from having to pay for all of that out of pocket.

But what can you do if you file a workers’ compensation claim and it gets denied or your insurance company denies your car accident claim or any other insurance claim?

The Appeals Process

The insurance claims process is often extremely arduous. It involves lots of paperwork that needs to be filled out on a demanding schedule. Because of all this bureaucracy, insurance denials are common, even when the claimant has a legitimate claim. If you make a single mistake, your claim might be denied for purely bureaucratic reasons.

Thankfully, every insurance process also has a built-in appeals process. If you have made a purely technical mistake, this process may be the ideal way to get a denial overturned. You can correct the mistake, and the insurance company will often change its decision.

However, that is far from guaranteed, especially if the insurance company isn’t acting in good faith. It might just claim some other violation of the process and continue to deny your claim.

Furthermore, the appeals process is controlled by the insurance company. This means if you were denied for non-technical reasons, you will likely be denied again. So while the appeals process can help in some situations, it is not a perfect solution.

Lawsuit

If the insurance claims process is not serving you the way it should, you have the right to petition the courts for relief. However, it is important to note that this right may be limited in some situations.

For example, one of the benefits employers receive for purchasing workers’ compensation insurance is nearly blanket protection from lawsuits.

While you can still file a lawsuit if the insurance company is acting in bad faith, you will almost always be limited on how much compensation you can get. Thankfully, those limits shouldn’t affect your ability to get fair economic compensation.

The biggest disadvantage of filing a lawsuit is that trials rarely end quickly. You will probably spend years in litigation if the case goes to trial.

Your case might end in a settlement, but typically, if the insurance company was going to agree to a fair settlement, it would have done so before spending tens of thousands of dollars on lawyers.

The Importance of Hiring a Lawyer

The easiest way through a claim is not having it denied in the first place, and the best way to avoid having your claim denied is to hire an experienced personal injury lawyer as soon as you are hurt.

Experienced New York personal injury lawyers will independently investigate your claim to gather relevant evidence. This evidence will then be presented to the insurance company to ensure it can’t be ignored.

Furthermore, your lawyer can more accurately determine the value of your claim than you can. This is an important advantage in any fight with an insurance company.

Insurance adjusters will likely try to tempt you with a subpar offer, knowing you are unfamiliar with the true value of your case. Your lawyer prevents you from taking that offer.

Finally, when you hire a lawyer, you are implicitly threatening the insurance company with a lawsuit. The insurance company knows that if it acts in bad faith, you will file a lawsuit, which will cost the insurance company a lot of money. This implicit threat discourages the insurance company from denying your claim.

You can hire a lawyer after your claim has been denied, but that just puts your lawyer at a disadvantage. It is much better to hire an attorney as soon as possible. This decreases the likelihood that your claim will be denied and gives your lawyer an advantage if the insurance company does deny the claim.

When Handling an Insurance Denial in New York, ASK4SAM

Having an insurance claim denied after suffering a serious injury just makes a bad situation even worse. You can’t afford to trust the insurance company to make things right after it denies your claim. Get the help of a personal injury lawyer in New York you can trust. Contact us and ASK4SAM.