Health Law

Wal-Mart?s ERISA Insurer Strikes A Special Needs Trust

By Richard Shea

In August I first brought up the growing trend of insurance companies using ERISA laws to recover from the proceeds of personal injury suits pursued by their own customers against those responsible for the injury. You can read that article here.

I had hoped this would not become a snowballing trend because in many ways it is truly horrible. Unfortunately here I am writing about it again because Wal-Mart recently won an appeal to recover an entire settlement from one of their health insurance customers.

The customer suffered the injury and went through the process and expense to get the settlement, then Wal-Mart comes in after the customer did all the work and makes a claim for reimbursement of medical costs they paid. And to make it worse, they made the claim and were successful against the funds that went into a special needs trust.

Wal-Mart was paid, the attorneys were paid, and the injured person received nothing. If you ever pursue an injury lawsuit be sure your attorney has a plan for how to handle an ERISA reimbursement claim from your health insurer or you could end up with nothing to show for your time and effort at the end of the day.

You can read the full story here.

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Full post as published by Connecticut Medicaid & Estate Planning on December 02, 2007 (boomark / email).