Posted On August 13, 2013 Personal Injury
As if the injuries you have suffered in an accident aren’t bad enough, you may be in for yet another rude awakening when you call your doctor’s office. If you didn’t sustain the kind of urgent, life-threatening injuries that required you to take a spontaneous ambulance ride to the local emergency room, you may have thought you were doing the right thing by waiting until you could see a physician in a non-emergency setting.
Unfortunately, things don’t go as you planned. As soon as he or she hears the word “car accident,” the doctor’s office receptionist tells you that your primary care doctor can’t help you because he or she won’t treat accident victims. It doesn’t matter that you’ve been a loyal patient for years. It doesn’t seem to matter that what you at first thought were only minor aches and pains have intensified so much that you are having difficulty working or completing even the most basic tasks at home. You can’t get the medical care you need.
It’s common for victims in this situation to feel frustrated or anxious. As your pain gets progressively worse, you know you can’t wait to get care. You may feel betrayed by your trusted doctor and furious that another driver’s reckless behavior put you in this situation.
Rest assured that we won’t allow you to go without needed medical care for your injuries. Just give our office a call to set up a free consultation and learn how we can help. For starters, we’ll locate the kind of doctor you need in your area, and we’ll make sure that he or she is willing to treat accident victims. This means you don’t have to spend hours searching through an online directory or printed phone book and calling every provider on the list just to be told that their office can’t help you either. The sooner you get the medical care you need, the better.
It may seem ridiculous that when you need a doctor most – when you are in extreme pain from an injury in need of diagnosis and treatment – he or she refuses to help. It’s not that your doctor is deliberately abandoning you, even though it may feel that way. Unfortunately, we see the situation happen all the time where victims are forced to wait for care because their primary doctors won’t see them. You may have even noticed signs in the waiting room or examination rooms of your doctor’s office in the past.
Your doctor can’t help you because his or her office staff does not have the proper training to process your bills. In New Jersey, a section of your auto insurance coverage called Personal Injury Protection (PIP) is responsible for paying your medical bills after an accident. In theory, PIP reduces patient wait time, because your insurance company pays regardless of fault. You don’t have to put off procedures because two insurance companies are bickering over who caused the accident. In practice, though, PIP billing can be so complicated that some physicians decide not to accept patients who will be paying through PIP coverage at all. Don’t worry – just because you can’t see your usual doctor doesn’t mean you can’t get quality medical care for your injuries.
