Since insurers now report injury settlements electronically under federal Medicare reporting rules, this can blow up faster than it used to. If you are on Medicare, the big deadline is usually after settlement: once Medicare issues a final demand, you generally have 60 days to repay it before interest starts.

Before you know that, a Keene gig driver hurt dodging spring-thaw potholes on Route 9 or I-91 may think the check gets split only between the lawyer and the client. That is not how it works.

After you know it, you treat the settlement like a pie with claims on it first:

• Attorney's fee and case costs
• Medicare conditional payments
• New Hampshire Medicaid reimbursement, if Medicaid paid accident-related bills
• Health insurance reimbursement/subrogation, depending on the policy or ERISA plan
• Your share last

What changes most is timing. If Medicare or New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services paid for crash treatment, you do not wait until the money is in your account to figure it out. You identify those claims before the check is disbursed, review the charges, and dispute unrelated bills early.

Another change: hospitals in New Hampshire generally do not have the kind of automatic statutory hospital lien some states use. A Keene hospital bill can still be owed, sent to collections, or sued on, but it is not automatically entitled to a direct slice of every injury settlement just because you were treated there.

If your health plan paid bills, the plan language matters. A private insurer may have reimbursement rights, and a self-funded ERISA plan is often tougher to fight than an ordinary policy.

The panic point is real, but "too late" usually means you settled without checking, not that you missed a pre-settlement filing date. The fastest move now is to get the exact payoff amounts before any Keene settlement money goes out.