The insurance company sent me a medical authorization to sign. Should I?

There are two very different documents here

A targeted records request asks for the treatment connected to this crash: named providers, a date range that starts around the collision, the body parts you are claiming. That is reasonable, and a claim cannot be paid without it.

A blanket medical authorization is a different animal. It typically has no end date, no provider limit and no subject-matter limit, and it lets the insurer request records from anyone who ever treated you, for anything, going back years. People sign it because it arrives in the same envelope as the claim number and looks like paperwork.

Read what you were sent. If it does not name providers and does not limit dates, it is the second kind.

What they are looking for

Not fraud. They are building the argument that your pain predates the wreck.

The search is for a prior back complaint, an old sports injury, a workers' compensation claim from a decade ago, a previous accident, degenerative findings on imaging. Also for things with no bearing on a neck injury at all — mental health treatment, substance history, an obstetric record — because those shape how a file gets valued and how a deposition gets conducted.

Insurers also cross-check prior claims through industry databases. A blanket authorization turns a claim about one collision into a review of your life.

Limiting it is not stonewalling

You do not have to choose between signing a blank check and refusing to cooperate. An authorization can be written to release records from the providers who treated you, from the date of the crash forward, for the injuries you are actually claiming. That gives the adjuster what they need to evaluate your case and nothing else.

Here is the part that matters: if the case is eventually filed, the insurer can seek your records through discovery — but then a judge decides the scope, and relevance is a real limit. Signing the blanket form early hands over voluntarily, with no limit and no referee, what they would otherwise have to justify.

If you have already signed one, you can generally revoke it in writing. Revocation works going forward; it does not retrieve what was already sent. Do it sooner rather than later.

Your own insurer is a different relationship

This is the distinction people get wrong, and it can cost them coverage.

The other driver's carrier owes you nothing but the claim. Your carrier — for PIP, for medical payments, for uninsured or underinsured motorist coverage — has a contract with you, and that contract contains a cooperation clause. Flatly refusing to provide records or to give a statement to your own insurer can jeopardize benefits you paid premiums for.

The answer is still not a blanket authorization. It is knowing which company you are dealing with and what your own policy actually obligates you to do. Those obligations are narrower than most adjusters describe them, but they are real.

What an old record actually proves

One reassurance, because this is where people panic and sign: a prior condition does not end your case. Texas has followed the rule for well over a century that a wrongdoer takes the injured person as they find them, and you can recover for the aggravation of something that was already there.

What prior records do is establish your baseline — which usually helps, because a chart showing you were functioning before the crash and are not now is exactly the comparison that wins. The problem is never the record itself. It is handing over a stack of unrelated records without knowing what is in them.

Authority: Coates v. Whittington, 758 S.W.2d 749 (Tex. 1988)