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Someone that has suffered a personal injury should be able to file a claim for both economic and non-economic losses. How does the insurance company manage to place a value on a non-economic loss?
Mental and physical trauma
The term pain and suffering cover any emotional or mental injuries. The victim could develop an extreme fear/phobia of the sort of situation that caused the victim’s existing injury. Some victims develop insomnia, or report having experienced unpleasant dreams.
When an accident has caused the unexpected death of a loved one, family members could experience immense grief. Personal injury lawyer in Sudbury know that victims often worry about how to approach the task of putting their lives back together. Someone that has been injured in an accident could be forced to deal with certain inconveniences, such as dependence on some type of medical device. A prolonged inconvenience could have the ability to disrupt the victims’ lifestyle, or even their everyday activities.
Different methods used for determining the value of a non-economic loss
Multiplier method: Adjusters that use this method multiply the total for all of the claimant’s medical bills by a selected figure, usually between 1.5 and 5. That figure is supposed to represent the value of the reported injury. When claimants report only soft injuries, that figure is closer to 1.5.
However, if a claimant has sustained a catastrophic injury, that figure would be 5, or possibly higher. If a claimant’s pain and suffering had persisted for a long time, and had introduced a profound effect on the victim’s life, then a tenfold increase in the economic losses get calculated, in order to determine the value for the same pain and suffering.
Per Diem method: One value is assigned to each day from the date of the accident until the date when the patient has reached maximum medical improvement (MMI). Naturally, the longer the patient’s recovery, the higher the value becomes, for any reported, non-economic losses.
Some insurance companies use a computer program to determine the value for a given claimant’s pain and suffering. The software in such programs has the ability to adjust for factors that get overlooked in the multiplier or Per Diem methods. That feature underscores the reason that a growing number of insurance companies have chosen to rely on the figures spewed out by the computer.
For example, the present-day software programs consider more than the nature of the reported injury; each of them also takes into consideration the nature of the prescribed treatment. In addition, such software can study the length of a given treatment, when calculating a value for the reported non-economic losses. Still, if a treatment has gone on for an extended amount of time, the insurance company might decide to disregard the treatment’s length.