Understanding Future Medical Expenses After Your Injury Case is Over

To some extent, damages in a personal injury case, and evaluating how much compensation is fair and necessary, is an exercise in looking into the future. That’s because many of the damages after an accident are life altering, and will affect the victim long after the injury case is resolved.

One area where this is necessary, is in awarding future medical expenses. Future medical expenses are medical expenses related to your accident and treatment for your injuries from the accident, going into the future—far in the future, even after the actual injury case has resolved.

Difficult to Predict and Calculate

Unlike future medical expenses, past medical expenses are easy to calculate—add up the victim’s bills and expenses.

But not everybody’s medical treatment ends when their injury case ends. For many people, they will need continuing medical care, long after the injury case is over, and that requires some prediction about what a victim may need, not just in the short term, but looking forward, even years into the future.

What Does it Include?

This doesn’t just include the hard cost of going to doctors, or having surgeries. It also includes costs related to, for example, transportation costs if your injuries prevent you from driving, or nutritional or dietary needs, or pain management, or modifications to your home to accommodate your disabilities.

It may even include treatment for “opportunitistic” disease—for example, many injuries people sustain in accidents, can lead to earlier onset or more serious arthritis years in the future. People who rely on implants or medical devices, may have a higher likelihood of repeated infections. Seriously injured people may have compromised immune systems, and thus, may need more regular treatment for otherwise avoidable disease.

How to Prove Future Medical Expenses

Of course, future medical expenses are not an exact science. A doctor may say that you need 3 more surgeries or that you will need to get regularly tested, or that you will always have flare ups, or that you will always have to be on medication, and none of that may end up being true as time goes on.

But of course the opposite is true also—you may end up needing way more treatment, medication, therapy, or even surgical procedures, than your doctors think you may need right now.

Projecting any future expense also needs to include calculations for inflation—a surgery today may not cost the same as one that may be needed 15 years in the future.

In many cases, future medical expenses will rely upon the testimony of your medical providers. Having treated thousands of patients in the past, they are in the best position to know what someone with your injury may need, 1, 5, or 10 years into the future.

Juries also tend to understand that, especially in major accidents and major injuries, treatment can be ongoing for many years.

Call our Boston personal injury lawyers at The Law Office of Joseph Linnehan, Jr. today at 617-275-4200 for help and to understand what kind of compensation may be right for you, after your accident and injury.

Sources:

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

my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/opportunistic-infections