The number one job of anyone who works for an insurance company is to limit the amount of money that they pay out on any given case. To them if they’d have to pay out a total of $200,000.00 in your case under their worst case scenario, if they somehow get away with only paying $70,000.00 it’s a huge win for them.
So as you can imagine, insurance companies will do whatever they can to limit what they pay you. You are focused on your health and getting back to work, they are focused on their bottom line.
A crystal clear example of this was shown in a case we were recently called about. The worker has a really bad had injury that required a major surgery that will leave the worker with permanent restrictions. Most of the bills and lost time had been paid, but suddenly they were having trouble getting therapy sessions approved and the TTD checks were late for no reason.
They called the insurance company and long story short they got told some b.s. about the TTD being late over confusion about whether they can work on restrictions and if they would just resign the job then there wouldn’t be an issue.
Fortunately this set off red flags with the worker and they called us. Never resign your job while you are still getting TTD benefits. If you do and you are on work comp your benefits will be cut off. If your restrictions are permanent and you would have been entitled to a wage differential that will go away. This was really one of the most unethical things we’ve seen an insurance company do.
Bottom line is that resigning your job can cost you potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. Don’t do it without consulting with a lawyer first. You need to understand what you could lose by doing so. We get that it might be a relief to be done with the job that is treating you like garbage, but you also must understand the long term problems that could be created. It may be that you have a new job lined up and often it’s ok to take that job, but at the same time you need a risk analysis of how it could hurt your work comp case.
If you want to talk about resigning or anything else, call us any time at 312-346-5578. We help all over Illinois.
