How And When Can You Get Compensated For Future Medical Expenses?

If you have serious injuries in any kind of accident, there is a strong likelihood, that your medical needs and medical care related to that accident, will go on, long after your injury case has resolved.

But that seems unfair. How do you get compensation for the medical care you need, when that medical care won’t even happen until sometime in the future, and when you may not even know exactly what kind of care you’ll need, or the cost of that care?

Future Medical Expenses

Thankfully, to help with this problem, the law gives injury victims the chance to recover what are known as future medical expenses. As the name suggests, future medical expenses are those medical expenses you will incur as a result of any kind of medical treatment related to the accident, after the case is over, whether those expenses are incurred shortly after the injury case ends, or whether they are incurred years in the future.

Calculating the Unknown

To some extent, future medical expenses are an inexact science. You know from personal experience that sometimes injuries heal better and faster than you expect, and then sometimes, they heal slower, or have more complications than you thought, or sometimes, they never heal at all.

All this also doesn’t account for advancements in medicine that may happen in the future–procedures and therapies unavailable to you now, may be available in the future.

Because of this uncertainty, juries are often hesitant to give money for future medical expenses. That’s why to get them you have to present expert testimony, usually from a treating doctor, as to what kind of medical care someone with your injuries, at your age, with your medical background, can expect to have going forward.

In more complex cases, you may even need the help of an economist, to testify what medical care will cost years into the future, and to account for the impact that inflation will have.

There must be some way that the jury can calculate these numbers–they can’t just randomly give you a pot of money and say “just in case you need medical care in the future.” That means that your attorney, working with your experts, must develop a formula or plan or breakdown of what you are asking the jury for, to compensate you for medical expenses.

Future medical care can include more than just doctor visits, therapy or procedures. They can also include the cost of prescriptions, of opportunistic diseases, or medical devices.

Saving Properly for the Future

Although they are called future medical expenses, if awarded, you will get that money now. That means that you may want to consider putting money for future medical expenses in a trust, or some separate account, to make sure that money is there for you later on, when you may need it for medical treatment.

Contact our Rhode Island injury lawyers at Robert E. Craven & Associates to see about getting compensation you need after an accident.

Sources:

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

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