Understanding Your Rights to Medical Malpractice Compensation in New York
Medical malpractice can result in numerous losses, which include medical costs, lost wages and non-economic damages such as pain and suffering. A qualified New York attorney can help you determine your rights to a fair settlement.
The first step is to determine if you sustained injuries because of a medical mistake. The next step is to bring a malpractice lawsuit.
Medical expenses
The most obvious expense in the context of malpractice is that of medical treatment required to treat the resultant injuries. It is important to know that this type of damage is capped by state law at a specific amount set in the liability policy of a healthcare provider's insurance policy. Some states also establish injured patients compensation funds to reduce the cost of litigation and help lower the cost of liability insurance for health care providers.
Victims are entitled to compensation in addition to medical costs in the event of negligence being deemed to be a contributing factor. These are known as economic or special damages. They cover the cost of any medical treatments (past and in the future) which are required to address the injury resulting from the malpractice, as well as any lost income due to not being able to work due to the injury.
In medical malpractice cases, pain and damages are also common. The amount of damages for pain and suffering is a subjective one and can vary widely between claimants. This includes physical pain, emotional distress and other non-physical effects of the error. A plaintiff, for example could be compensated if an error by a doctor that caused her not to attend an important cancer screening.
In addition, punitive damages can also possible in certain instances. They are meant to penalize doctors for particularly unprofessional actions, such as leaving a sponge inside a patient after surgery.
Pain and suffering
In medical malpractice cases it is a matter of pain and suffering. It is one of the types of non-economic damages. The damages are for physical and mental trauma that a victim suffered as a result the negligence of a doctor. The symptoms can be minor such as pain or anxiety or they can be severe such as loss of enjoyment in life as well as depression, embarrassment or anxiety.
It's not easy to put an amount of money on suffering and pain, therefore jury instructions usually leave it up to the jurors to use their own judgment of their background, experience, and knowledge in determining what they believe is fair and reasonable. The amounts that are awarded in malpractice lawsuits vary greatly.
Your medical malpractice attorney (
written by Pickmein) can assist you in proving the severity of your pain using evidence that is tangible. Photos, X-rays, models, home movies diagrams, and drawings can all help a jury see the severity of your injuries and understand how they impact your daily routine.
If a doctor's negligence led to the death of a victim family members can seek damages through wrongful death lawsuits or survival statutes. Laws governing wrongful deaths typically permit the spouse and children to collect the same types of compensation that they would have received if the patient had survived. The amount the victim can collect is typically restricted by the state's cap on suffering and pain. This is why it's so important to find a skilled medical malpractice lawyer on your side to fight for the compensation you deserve.
Loss of wages
You can get back your lost wages if you miss work due to medical negligence. This includes your base pay commissions, bonuses, employment benefits, raises in pay, and retirement fund contributions. Your attorney will look over your pay stubs for the previous year to determine your average earnings prior to the injury, and then subtract the missed work to arrive at the total loss of wages. Your attorney can also assist you in determining your future loss of earnings using a present value calculation. This is a sophisticated financial analysis that analyzes the effects of your injuries on your ability to work in the future. it's usually done by a specialist hired by your attorney.
In addition to reimbursing your economic losses, you can seek non-economic damages to compensate for pain and suffering triggered by the accident. The jury will decide the appropriate amount of compensation for these damages, which can vary widely from case to circumstance. However, some states have a limit on the amount of damages they can claim, and they've been ruled illegal in a variety of cases.
Settlements of seven figures tend to be caused by serious permanent injuries or death caused by extreme healthcare negligence. For example, surgical mistakes resulting in amputations, birth defects that result in the brain of a baby and death, as well as anesthesia errors that cause comas could all be the reason for high-value settlements. Punitive damages, designed to punish bad behavior could also be a possibility in certain circumstances.
Damages to future medical treatment
In the case of medical
malpractice law firms there are two kinds of damages a plaintiff could seek: economic and non-economic damages. The former are based upon calculable financial losses, such as past and future medical expenses. The latter is more difficult to quantify, which includes suffering and loss of enjoyment of life. In a lawsuit involving medical malpractice, the jury will need to hear expert testimony to determine the kind of losses.
Past medical expenses are relatively easy to prove by providing actual bills from the person who was injured's health care providers. For future expenses, the attorney for the plaintiff will provide medical evidence that shows what treatments are likely to be required in the future and how much the treatments cost at present. The amount of medical treatment required can also be dependent on the age of the victim at the time of the incident.
The damages for lost wages in the future can be established by showing the impact of an injury on a patient's capacity to work and earning capacity in the future. This may be supported by expert testimony or by studying similar cases in the past.
Pain and suffering is a wider class of damages that encompasses the physical and emotional pain and distress that a patient suffers from medical malpractice. This type of damage is usually based on the testimony of witnesses and victims and evidence like photographs of videotapes and written reports.