Protect Yourself After You've Been Injured

What do you do if you are hurt at work and your boss tells you to say it happened at home so your health insurance pays with a promise that your boss will take care of everything? You may feel like you don’t have a choice or feel you somehow owe the boss to do as he instructs. But you do have other options. Ultimately, you have to protect yourself. When you go to the doctor, it is ok to give your insurance information as well as your employer’s information. But telling the doctor that you got hurt “at home” instead of at work can have very serious consequences that can leave you with medical bills you have to pay yourself and can ultimately be fatal to a work comp case. 

As soon as you are hurt at work, you need to report it to your supervisor. You should then seek medical treatment as soon as possible. When you go to the doctor, it is absolutely imperative to give an accurate and detailed history of how you were hurt and where it happened. The law expects you to be honest with your doctor, so the history recorded in your records is important. You should request a copy of the doctor’s dictated report to verify the history is accurate and ask him to change it if there is an error.

Despite a promise from your boss to take care of everything, if he decides that your injury is getting too expensive or he just doesn’t have the funds to pay your medical bills, you may end up paying for your injury yourself if you say it happened outside of work. A boss that asks you to lie to your own doctor about how you were injured will likely lie in your work comp case. He will deny that he told you to lie. He may even deny that you told him you were injured at work. 

The attorneys at Black & Jones have handled many cases where the worker and boss were close friends, or even family members, and the boss still failed to tell the truth. Despite the best of intentions early on, when your employer is worried more about their money than your health, you mean very little to them. That is why it’s important to consult with an attorney. Retaining an attorney is not about giving your employer a hard time. It’s about protecting you and your family and making sure that the insurance company provides the benefits that you, as the injured worker, are entitled to under the law.