Why I can’t write “letters of protection” to health care providers
My personal injury clients are sometimes asked by their healthcare providers to ask me to send them what they call a “letter of protection.” In short, I can’t. But let’s talk about why.
The “letter of protection” that these providers want is a promise from me that I’ll pay their bill from the settlement. This is problematic on several levels, but let’s focus on the big one. For an attorney to promise to hold someone else’s interests over the interests of their clients is a conflict of interest, and if you have watched television in the past two decades, you know that that is a bad thing. Obviously, I cannot create such a conflict by promising a party that I’ll protect them over my client.
The good news is that these letters of protection are totally unimportant in the collections process. If the health care provider wants to treat the patient/client on a lien basis and get paid from the settlement, all they have to do is read the NC lien statute and perfect their lien! And trust me, that’s a very low bar and is very easy to accomplish. A perfected lien creates a legal obligation for me to address that bill in disbursement, and that a law is better than any letter I can write.
It is worth noting that sometimes these requests belie a somewhat nefarious end. I’ll be the first to say that health insurance sucks. But that’s the system we have and so we’re stuck with it. Of course when you use health insurance, that results in an “adjustment,” which is really just a fancy word for discount. This means that when you use health insurance the health care provider gets paid less than they would if you just paid them cash (or if they got paid from a settlement). Sometimes, though not always, a health care provider will advise a patient/client in a personal injury setting to NOT use their health insurance in an effort to make the health care provider’s bill payment higher. To that end they request the aforementioned letter of protection which in their minds solidifies their ability to get paid at the end of an injury claim. This is not often in the interests of the patient/client, as they could use their health insurance, get that discount, and not be burdened with the hassle of balances later. Of course, I’m not saying every provider who asks for such a letter is out to improve their billing, and maybe the motivation is benevolent in some instances. But sometimes it ain’t.
This, like lots of topics surrounding personal injury claims in NC, can be complicated. If you have a personal injury claim, call me at 919-929-2992.
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