When you are injured at work in Illinois and it’s a workers’ compensation case, all of you medical bills should be paid. That means 100%, with no co-pays or out of pocket expenses. This is true as long as your treatment is related to your injury and your treatment is reasonable. That means that it wasn’t experimental procedures that aren’t commonly used.

What happens a lot is a worker gets injured, they get medical care, they get better and they move on with their life. They had turned their claim into the employer’s work comp and expected that everything would be taken care of. One day out of the blue, often a couple of years later, you get a bill in the mail that you thought was paid or didn’t even know existed.

When this happens, there are a few things we need to know to see if we can get that bill paid for you:

  1. Was your injury less than three years ago? If yes it’s not too late to file a case and we can help. If it was more than three years ago we’d ask the next question.
  2. Has any bill or other payment related to this injury/accident been paid in the last two years? If so that would extend the statute of limitations time for filing a case.
  3. Did you take a settlement in this case? If yes, it comes down to whether or not your settlement contract indicates that all bills have been paid or not. If you did take a settlement you should go back to your original lawyer.

If we are able to help, not only could we get the bill paid, we can get any negative marks taken away from your credit report removed (potentially) because they can’t take collection actions against you when you have an active work comp case.

We also could get you a settlement for your injury. So not only could your bill get paid, but you could be entitled to thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.

All this said, it’s best to never end up in this situation in the first place. We’ve been contacted by people who first saw a bill four years after their accident and there was nothing we could do to help them. So I highly recommend that if you are injured while working in Illinois that you contact every medical provider to verify if a bill has been paid. You can never trust an insurance company or your employer to do the right thing. If you wait too long, the bills will become your responsibility.

And as always, if you have any questions or want to speak to a lawyer for free about an unpaid bill or anything else, you can call us at 312-346-5578. We help people everywhere in Illinois.