Many people hurt on the job find out to their surprise that receipt of workers’ compensation is not automatic. Even when it appears as if the claim is 100 percent valid, many claims are denied, and claimants either give up or go through the appeals process. In either event, an injured worker can wait up to two years to achieve a satisfactory outcome.
In New Jersey and elsewhere, workers’ compensation claims are sometimes denied to prevent fraud. Not only do some applicants try to collect long-term disability by deception (faking injury or lying about where the injury occurred), employers, healthcare providers and attorneys are sometimes implicated in fraudulent applications.
To make sure a valid claim is approved, many workers are best served by engaging a lawyer to represent them, either in the original application or in an appeal to a rejected claim. A disability claims attorney can expedite the process and is much more likely to achieve success on a first claim for the following reasons:
- A disability attorney knows how to work with doctors to identify information in medical files relevant to the disability claim.
- The attorney understands how to extract key information from the insurance company claim file (especially when appealing a denial).
- Because no money needs to be paid until a claim is accepted, the claims attorney has as much incentive to make sure a claim is accepted as does the accident victim.
For most individuals disabled on the job, a protracted application process can cause hardship. Contacting a disability claims attorney early in the process almost always yields an earlier payout of workers’ compensation benefits.
-
Phil's Message
