When you suffer from an incident of medical malpractice, you will likely experience some level of pain or suffering, as well as further medical costs to treat it. You might even miss out on work in that time and lose income. Fortunately, there are damages available in a medical malpractice claim when a medical professional’s negligence plays a part. Call our Louisiana team to learn more about what you might be entitled to receive.
In any personal injury case or wrongful death case, there may be a demand for special damages and for general damages. The special damages are the losses that we can calculate, including doctor or hospital bills, prescription costs, physical therapy, or any other medical expense related to the injury. They come with a specific cost that we can tally up and include in the damages demand.
There may also be future medical treatment caused by the medical malpractice event which can also be calculated. While we cannot achieve a specific dollar amount for treatment that hasn’t happened yet, we can get a treating physician’s opinion of the procedures, medicines, and therapies that may be needed in the future. We use a Life Care Plan expert to calculate what those expenses will be in the future, over a lifetime. We often use an economist or a certified public accountant to bring those numbers to what they call “present value.”
The same strategy applies when calculating a loss of income. If a medical malpractice victim loses out on income while recovering, our experts can look at their earnings before the medical event and afterwards. If there is a difference, that would be the lost earnings between the time of the event and the time of trial or settlement. We can also calculate future lost wages and/or impairment of earning capacity, and it often hinges on whether the person is left totally disabled from the medical event or partially disabled. If they are partially disabled, the damages are calculated as the difference between pre-malpractice earnings and post-malpractice earnings or expected earnings.
Pain and suffering are a type of compensation that is left up to the jury. There is no yardstick to measure pain and suffering, but the jury is instructed by the judge that the intensity and duration of the suffering is a factor. Someone who has a very painful injury may be awarded more damages than someone with less intense injury. However, somebody may have less severe pain, but will experience it for the rest of their life over many, many years, which can increase what is awarded.
The cap for damages in Louisiana is $500,000, even for situations where the total amount of loss comes out to millions of dollars. If we try a case and a jury comes back with a large award, then under the Medical Malpractice Act, the judge will reduce damages to the maximum amount. There are some cases that do not fall under the Medical Malpractice Act, which we can explain further if it applies to your situation.
The purpose of a medical malpractice claim is to recover damages, so it is important to understand what they are, and what you might receive. Call Kopfler & Hermann to learn more about how we can help.
