Determining the value of your injury claim is an important part of the claims process, but can be difficult in some cases depending on the circumstances surrounding your accident. With this in mind, here’s a brief overview of how insurance companies will value your claim.
Compensated items
There are certain damages insurance companies must pay for. These include:
- Medical care rehabilitation expenses
- Lost wages because of time unable to work due to the accident
- Permanent disfigurement or disability
- Emotional damages, including stress, pain and suffering, embarrassment or depression
- Damages to compensate for strains on family relationships
- Loss of social, educational or training experiences
- Property damage
Determining damage amounts
In some circumstances, it’s easy to determine exactly what the insurance company owes. You will have a concrete dollar amount for your medical bills and lost wages, for example. In other circumstances, it can be hard to arrive at a dollar amount for your injury claim, because there’s no truly objective way to price pain and suffering or lost opportunities.
For these noneconomic damages, insurance companies will use a damage multiplier. The more serious or long-lasting the effects, the higher the multiplier.
For example, if the injuries are relatively minor, the insurance adjuster will add up the amount of economic damages you sustained and multiply by 1.5 or two to get your total damage amount. However, if the injuries are severe or particularly painful, the adjuster could use a multiplier of up to five or even 10, in certain extreme cases.
For more information on how an adjuster chooses the multiplier and arrives at your compensation figure, meet with a skilled Bradenton personal injury lawyer at Goldman, Babboni, Fernandez, Murphy & Walsh.