Auto Injury Insurance Claims, Part III

A Dropping Reimbursement Ratio, Part II: Making it Personal

Billed charges for MRI’s showed a median of $2,194 per Bodily Injury claimant, while actual payments that the injured person received were $1,410. This is a 34% reduction, or, to state it differently, in this scenarios the injured people were left to pay 34% of their charges–$1,408—on their own.

For CT scans, the median charge of $2,207 was reduced to a payment of $757—a full 66% reduction, leaving the claimant to cover $1,450 on their own.

And it’s the lowest levels of economic loss that are seeing the highest ratio of reimbursement. Claimants with $500 or less in claimed economic expenses received $3.02 in compensation for every dollar of reported loss. For claimants that had fewer than 10 days of restricted activity, payments back to them from their insurer were up 7 percent annualized. For claimants that had more than 10 days of restricted activity, though, payments were nearly unchanged from 2002—despite the fact that, as stated earlier, inflation was higher even for medical care than it was for general inflation across the country.