Future Medical Expenses Can be Tough to Calculate

If you are injured in an accident, you may have a right to be compensated for what is known as future medical expenses. And while that may seem like an obvious thing, many injury victims aren’t aware just what future medical expenses are, and how to get them in their injury case.

What are Future Medical Expenses?

Future medical expenses, as the name suggests, seek to compensate a victim for medical expenses that the victim may incur in the future, that are related to the accident. Because medical treatment may go on for years, or even a lifetime after an accident — long after the injury case concludes by settlement or jury verdict — to pay someone’s future medical expenses, we have to try to predict what medical treatment a person may need in the future.

Not an Easy Prediction

That isn’t easy, because no two people heal exactly the same, and even people with the exact same injuries, may need a different course of treatment 5, 10 or 15 years into the future.

Juries see future medical expenses with mixed reactions. On the one hand, it is obvious that with more serious or catastrophic injuries, medical care and treatment may go on for a lifetime. Some things don’t “just heal.”

On the other hand, you are asking a jury to pay you for a contingency that hasn’t happened yet, and which may not ever happen at all — sometimes, someone in the future doesn’t need as much medical attention as we thought they would.

Opportunistic disease or injury also must be factored in. These are ailments that “take advantage” of a victim’s weakened state or injury. For example, things like long term arthritis, or infection in the future for people who have implants, or injuries that may weaken someone’s immune system and cause disease, need to be considered.

Add into that, the uncertain cost of goods looking into the future. Future medical expenses aren’t just about seeing doctors, or surgeries or tests. They also are about nutritional alterations and needs because of a victim’s injuries, modifications to homes or cars, the costs of medical devices, or even the cost of procedures that are now experimental, but which may be routine in the future.

Use of Experts

Even doctors themselves may disagree — medicine is often as much an art as a science, and doctors don’t always agree on a future course of medical care.

That means that cases that involve future medical expenses, often end up as a “battle of the experts,” with a victim’s expert and the Defendant’s expert providing conflicting testimony about what medical care and treatment the accident victim may need, going into the future.

Even economic experts may be needed, to determine the effect of inflation looking forward into the future.

Compensation for future medical care is an important part of your injury case. Schedule a consultation with our Tampa personal injury lawyers at Barbas, Nunez, Sanders, Butler & Hovsepian today for help after your accident.

Source:

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2709098/