How Much Does The Typical Award In A Medical Malpractice Case Cost?

Averaging at $348,065 and totaling over $4 billion paid to plaintiffs, medical malpractice lawsuits in 2018 were extremely lucrative for lawyers. Payouts were distributed with 96.5% coming from settlements and 3.5% from court decisions.

 

The Most Frequent Allegations Made In Malpractice Lawsuits

The study found that diagnostic errors accounted for 34.1% of all medical malpractice cases filed. Of all claims, 21.4% involved surgical misconduct and 21.1% involved improper treatment.

One examination of medical malpractice litigation rates in the United States from 1992 to 2014 found that surgical errors, treatment-related errors, and misdiagnoses are the most prevalent causes of claims, and these numbers corroborate those findings.

12.3% of claims ended in quadriplegia, brain damage, or other disabilities requiring lifetime care; 18.7% resulted in serious permanent injuries; and 29.7% resulted in fatalities. Also, payments for claims resulting in brain disability can reach up to$960,000, while average judgments for claims that resulted in death are around $380,300.

 

How Much Is My Medical Negligence Case Worth?

Obviously, if you think you have a valid claim, you're curious about the potential compensation you may get.

Attorneys typically use the following categories to describe damages:

• Damages that may be quantified monetarily are known as economic or special damages.
• Non-economic, general, or pain-and-suffering damages are examples of these types of damages, as they are not easily quantifiable or based on bills or prices.

Patients may be entitled to punitive damages if their doctors were reckless, reckless, or malicious in their treatment of them, or if the doctors knew or should have known that the doctors' acts would cause injury.

In order to win compensation for malpractice, you must prove that the defendant engaged in actual wrongdoing, such as

• The doctor's irresponsibility led directly to your losses.
• For the damages that have been incurred as a result of the misconduct, nothing further can be done.

Quantifying Your Incidental Losses

These are some of your injuries that did not exist before the malpractice event:

• Money that was supposed to be earned but wasn't.
• Financial burdens of medical care.
• Reduced possibility for future income.
• Furthermore quantifiable monetary losses.

Your medical costs include not just the money you've already spent on treatment for your ailments, but also any potential future outlays. In cases of medical misconduct, it is not uncommon for patients to incur future medical costs.

Lost earnings and lost earning capacity relate to the money you have lost or stand to lose as a result of the malpractice incident that caused your injuries. This accounts for the money that wouldn't have been spent on items like vacation time, health insurance, and retirement savings if the employee hadn't left the company. You may easily calculate the quantity of money you've lost in the past by adding up the wages and benefits you've missed out on because of your illness.

However, it will be more difficult to estimate how much money you would lose and how much you might be able to gain in the future. Your lawyer will need to retain the services of a financial expert to help present this information to the court in the most convincing manner possible. Let's say that before the medical malpractice incident, you were bringing in $50,000 year in income. You may have made some progress in your recovery, but you're still only able to work part-time and make $25,000 annually.

It means that throughout the course of your working life, you will lose an average of $25,000 in earnings. A worker's work-life expectancy is the average number of years (across demographics like age, race, and sex) someone may expect to keep working, based on official government data. While the number $25,000 per year may appear easy to calculate, projecting its value into the future is more trickier.

 

 

Calculating An Accurate Approximation Of Your Losses

Pain and suffering, like general damages, are notoriously hard to put a price on. The jury cannot use a chart, for instance, to determine the amount of pain and suffering you've experienced (or are experiencing) as a result of your injuries. This is why judges instruct jurors to consider their experience, knowledge, and common sense when determining pain and suffering damages.

Damages for "pain and suffering" include:

• The pain you're in because of the wounds on your body.
• What you're going through because of your injuries, handicap, deformity, or scars is terrible.
• Mental anguish and pain can take many forms, including emotional sadness, mental torment, anger, fear, embarrassment, a lack of joy in life, and trouble sleeping.
• We no longer have a common bond or purpose.

Examples of mental agony and suffering include clinical depression, manic episodes, violent outbursts, chronic fatigue, eating disorders, sleep disturbances, erectile dysfunction, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Don't discount the importance of intangible damages when calculating medical malpractice awards and settlements. Inform your attorney of all the ways in which your accident has affected your life so that they can accurately represent your losses to the insurance company.

 

Legal Representation For Malpractice Claims

Legal representation from a qualified medical malpractice attorney is essential for proving why and how the negligence occurred. Keep in mind that the crux of any malpractice claim is whether or not the treating physician deviated from the accepted norms of medical practice and whether or not that deviation was the direct cause of the patient's harm.

Although the doctor's actions will vary depending on the specifics of the case, the question of whether or not the doctor's actions constituted negligence boils down to whether or not another doctor in the same or comparable circumstances would have taken the same actions.

Discuss your case and the possible benefits of a settlement with an experienced medical malpractice attorney. Never forget that you can seek compensation from negligent doctors.