Report Injuries
Motor Vehicle Accidents (MVAs), are serious events with possible life-altering consequences. If you were injured in an MVA, you need to report your injuries to your motor vehicle insurance company. You will be assigned you a claim number and adjuster to monitor your case. You must also submit an application for Personal Injury Protection (PIP) for them to cover the accident.
MVA claims are important and often have financial implications more than twice of the average insurance claim. MVA claims can involve severe injuries including head, neck, and those involved can sustain multiple injuries. These claims can result in nearly a third of all claims over $500,000.
Coverage
In most cases, you should not have any financial responsibilities unless:
- Your individual health insurance benefits run out, but you continue to require medical care
- Your vehicle insurance denies additional coverage, possibly due to their determination of the extent of medical necessity
- You exhaust the available funds in your claim
Motor vehicle accident (MVA) claims can be notoriously complex and time-consuming to adjudicate. These can involve private insurance coverage, state law, and other factors. Typical hospital billing departments can have trouble reviewing settlements and correctly understanding letters of protection.
Accidents and Trauma
Motor vehicle accidents are traumatic events. Every year almost 1.3 million people die on the roads all over the world. Between 20–50 million people sustain non-fatal injuries each year.
Cutting-edge technology is allowing cars to become safer, steering themselves, maintaining safe following distances, and braking automatically. Yet, despite all of these safety improvements, vehicle accidents in the United States have actually been rising over the last several years.
What could explain this dangerous trend? Even as cars become safer, drivers are growing more distracted. With the explosion in smartphone use, the roads can become even more hazardous.
According to the National Safety Council, nearly a third of crashes in the United States involve drivers talking or texting on cell phones. Even more, the report states there is evidence that driver cell phone use is substantially underreported in crashes.
It’s not just physical injuries sustained either. MVAs can cause a wide array of chronic and acute psychological consequences, for months after the incident.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been identified in individuals up to 6 months post-MVAs, with a prevalence as high as a quarter of cases.
Some PTSD predictors are as follows:
- Prior history of trauma
- History of previous psychological problems
- Psychopathologies in family history
- A perceived threat to life
- Level of support post-trauma
- Emotional responses to the accident
- Dissociation
Traumatic dissociations include the reactions of distress, helplessness, sadness, frustration, or anger. These may be accompanied by physical responses such as sweating, shaking, and rapidly beating heart rate.
Emerging Issues
Although you might’ve walked away with few minimal injuries in a light accident and consider yourself very lucky, don’t assume that you’re not injured. It’s always best to seek professional medical help to evaluate your condition as other injures may begin to emerge that you won’t notice until well after the accident. It’s when these injuries begin to emerge that the medical records from after the accident become especially important.
As such, if you’re seeking to make any insurance or legal claims down the line, it’s always important to provide your medical records to an insurance company, insurance adjuster or lawyer. Doing so can help secure your financial future down the line and make things far smoother in claiming personal injury.