When you’re injured and pursuing a claim, it can come as a surprise that the insurance company is requesting your medical records from before the injury. Why do they need to go through your medical history?
In most cases, they don’t. Often, insurance companies are just fishing for an excuse to say that they don’t have to pay for your injuries. They’ll scour your medical records to look for anything that they call a “preexisting condition,” even if it has nothing to do with your injury.
Sometimes, it is reasonable for an insurer to request prior medical records. For example, if someone has knee surgery a few weeks before a car accident, the accident can re-injure the same knee. In that case, it’s reasonable for an insurance company to get the records of the surgery to make sure that everything went as planned.
A lawyer’s job is to figure out whether the insurance company’s request for prior medical records is reasonable or unreasonable. Is there a genuine issue, or is the insurance company fishing? At Marcotte Law Firm, we work with insurance companies to ensure that our client’s medical history is kept as private as possible.