You have 3 years from the crash date in New Hampshire to settle or file suit, or you can lose the claim entirely.

What the insurance company will tell you: "We'll issue one check and your medical people will sort it out." They make it sound automatic, clean, and non-negotiable.

What is actually true: a lot of those claims can be checked, reduced, or challenged before your settlement gets split up.

If you're a veteran hurt in a Dover crash near a school zone, bus stop, or on Route 16 during back-to-school traffic, you may have multiple payers in the mix:

• Medicare can demand reimbursement for crash-related treatment it paid.
• New Hampshire Medicaid can seek repayment for accident-related bills through the state.
• Private health insurance may claim reimbursement, especially if it's an employer plan.
• The VA is different. VA benefits do not work like a normal private insurer, but the federal government can pursue recovery tied to third-party liability care.

Do not accept a payout summary that just lists lump numbers.

Ask for an itemized conditional payment letter from Medicare, an itemized Medicaid lien statement, and a line-by-line reimbursement claim from any private insurer. Charges that are unrelated, duplicated, or outside the crash window should be disputed.

Also, New Hampshire is modified comparative fault. If you are found 51% or more at fault, you recover nothing. If you are under that, your recovery is reduced by your share of fault. That matters because every lien is fighting over a smaller pie.

One more thing: New Hampshire does not have the kind of broad automatic hospital lien system some people assume. A Dover hospital like Wentworth-Douglass does not simply get first dibs just because it treated you.

The practical move is to demand the full lien breakdown before signing a release. Once the case closes and funds go out, fixing bad lien math gets much harder.