Know Your Rights: Workers’ Compensation
Brian O Sutter
Personal Injury
Accidents happen. They happen at any time and at any location, and if they should happen at your workplace you may be entitled to workers’ compensation.Workers’ compensation is a large and complicated law, and it’s further complicated by the fact that the details tend to be different in every state. As an employee, your experience with workers’ compensation should be simple and straightforward: you get injured on the job, you inform your employer, you visit the doctors your employer’s insurance carrier tells you to visit, and the carrier pays for your medical bills and part of your weekly wages until you get back on your feet and you can start working again.
However, unless your injury is relatively inexpensive and straightforward, your experience is unlikely to go so smoothly. Insurance companies always do their best to limit their payouts, and their tactics may go so far as denying fair claims or else encouraging you to accept a settlement that gives you less money than what you deserve.
If you happen to be injured on the job in Florida or elsewhere, there are a few tips you should keep in mind as you deal with your workers’ compensation claims.
Be Prompt
In Florida, you have 30 days from the time of injury or from the time the injury is discovered to inform your employer in order to get your full workers’ comp benefits. You’re still entitled to file a claim up to two years later, but the fact that you waited so long may be held against you. If for whatever reason your employer doesn’t contact their insurer, you are entitled to contact them directly for compensation and assistance.
Be Honest
Like every other form of insurance, workers’ compensation is plagued with fraudulent cases, both of employees milking the system and employers filing claims for nonexistent or perfectly healthy employees.
The best way to avoid any accusations of fraud is to be as completely honest as possible at all points in the process and to update your doctor, your employer, and your insurance carrier regularly about your progress. If you over-exaggerate to get just a little more out of the system, you’re giving the carrier grounds to deny all claims and they may even bring you to court for fraud. You may also run into trouble if you under-exaggerate, since if you don’t recover as fast as you say you should it can look suspicious.
Keep All The Copies You Can
A classic tactic in any bureaucracy is to “lose the paperwork” and thereby deny someone’s benefits once the time to file them has expired. Even if there is no malicious intent, the reason the “lost the paperwork” excuse works is because all too often documents wind up lost in the mail or in the back of a filing cabinet. Even modern electronic systems can occasionally drop or corrupt important data. As such, you should take care to keep any bills, receipts, and document copies both physical and electronic in case they should need to be replaced.
When In Doubt, Get Help
A good personal injury lawyer familiar with the workers’ compensation laws in your state can help you navigate the muddy waters of insurance claims to make sure that the carrier is compensating you as fairly as possible. Even by simply being present, a workers’ comp lawyer may cause the carrier’s resistance to melt away as they contemplate the possibility of a tough legal battle in their near future.
If you happen to live or work in or around Charlotte or Sarasota counties in southwest Florida, the professionals of All Injuries Law Firm will be happy to provide you with whatever legal consultation and assistance you may need. Whether you’re injured on the job or elsewhere, we’ll make certain you get just compensation for whatever may befall you.