If you or somebody you care about has sustained an injury caused by the careless or negligent actions of another individual or entity in Colorado, you should be able to recover compensation for your losses. At some point, the insurance carriers involved will likely ask you to sign a medical release authorization form. It is important to understand what this form is and whether or not you should actually sign it.
Insurance carriers are typically for-profit entities, and we bring this up because this means a few things when it comes to medical release authorization forms. First, the insurance carriers will look for anything that they can that will help them reduce how much compensation they payout in a claim. To do this, they will attempt to look into the claimant’s medical history.
By examining a person’s medical history, they may be able to find some type of previous injury or illness that explains away the person’s current signs and symptoms. In other words, the insurance carrier will point to this previous injury or illness and say that it is what is causing the pain and suffering, not the incident they are making a claim for.
What does this have to do with a medical release authorization form?
A medical release authorization form is how the insurance carrier will obtain a person’s medical records to proceed forward with the claim. Just about any person involved in an injury will need to sign one of these forms at some point, but they need to be careful about the dates on the form.
The only medical history that insurance carriers will need is for the time frame after the incident occurred until a person reaches what a doctor considers maximum medical recovery. However, there are times when insurance carriers will simply hand over a medical release authorization form without any particular dates on it, and a person may unwittingly authorize the insurance carrier to obtain all of their medical records with no limitation on the dates.
If you or somebody you love has been injured due to the negligence of another and are working to recover compensation through an insurance settlement, you will be asked to sign a medical release authorization form. If you are handling the claim on your own, you need to make sure that you only authorize the release of records from the date the incident occurred moving forward until the present day. Do not authorize the insurance carrier to look at any of your past medical history or any medical history after you have reached recovery from the current incident.
We strongly encourage all personal injury victims in Colorado to speak to a skilled attorney about their claim before talking to the insurance carrier. An attorney will be able to examine any requests from the insurance carrier and respond appropriately. When you have a Denver personal injury lawyer by your side, he will have an advocate that investigates the claim, handles communication with the other parties involved, and helps negotiate a fair settlement on your behalf.
