If you have been injured in a bicycle accident, you are probably dealing with a lot of pain and wondering how you are ever going to pay for your hospital bills. Although dealing with medical appointments can be a full-time job, it is important to properly document all the details of your accident and have regular communications with your insurance company. It is also important to document all expenses related to the accident.

Collecting Documentation

As with any car accident, you must stay at the scene until the police arrive. It is also a good idea to collect the names of any witnesses. If your injuries are too severe to collect names at the scene, there are several other ways to get names of witnesses. You can put notice out on social media asking for witnesses and you can put flyers up at the scene of the accident asking for any witnesses to call you. Call your insurance company immediately and give them every detail that you can remember. Be sure to get a copy of the accident report as soon as possible and make sure that nothing was left out.

Get a receipt for every single thing that is related to your injury. Obviously, you want to collect receipts for medical visits and prescription medications, but you should also document other related expenses. Save all of your pay stubs during your period of recovery to document any time you lost from work. If you had to pay for child care to go to medical appointments, be sure to get a receipt from the child caretaker. If you get massages or have any kind of wellness treatment that may be considered physical therapy, you should save those receipts as well. If you have planned and paid for a vacation or business trip that you could not take due to an accident, be sure to bring along receipts for the trip and documentation of any money paid out that was non-refundable.

Seeking Compensation

Insurance companies have one goal and that is to keep as much money as they can. They have entire legal departments devoted to looking for any loophole in the law that will excuse them from paying on a claim. Many insurance companies will even hire private detectives whose job it is to photograph an injured person moving in a way that a doctor says they cannot. The will also try to catch a claimant participating in an activity that would suggest they are not really injured.

Seeking money for emotional pain and suffering is becoming increasingly difficult in the United States. Big companies have gotten together to form entire organizations dedicated to protecting themselves from paying out money on for intangible damages. The state of California is one of 33 states that has enacted some type of tort reform and the United State Congress passed medical malpractice tort reform just two years ago.

Corporations and the lobbyist and publicist who work for them have done an excellent job of turning public sentiment against injured people who want to be compensated for something that is hard to see and even harder to prove. Awards for anything other than monetary damages are often considered punitive, and the people who seek such awards are perceived as greedy from the public’s point of view. Insurance companies realize this and are usually unwilling to pay out any money for pain and suffering.

If you want to make sure that you will get the money you should after an accident, you must hire a good personal injury lawyer in Los Angeles.