ABSTRACT
Finally, in another commonly encountered pretreatment scenario, consider the promise made by the office’s insurance coordinator, that a patient’s insurance will cover the cost of treatment; a scenario most often encountered when providing services for temporomandibular dysfunction secondary to a traumatic event resulting in a whiplash type injury. If reimbursement is not forthcoming and the patient can successfully claim that he or she was induced to accept therapy based on this unfulfilled expectation, it is easy to ascribe liability for the breach of this promise to the doctor for the unanticipated financial loss suffered by the patient.
