Pain and Suffering

Are you entitled to this type of compensation?

Pain and suffering is by far the most common and litigate form of damages seek under the bodily injury claim umbrella.

Pain and/or suffering falls under the remedy or compensatory general damages section of tort law . The reason why the word �general� is part of the definition is because when there is a tort (like negligence) damages like pain and suffering generally occur.

General damages (pain and suffering) are very hard to calculate.

How much is your headache worth? To a claim adjuster not very much, but to you it could be in the million mark. And how does a claim adjuster differentiate between the people that claim that they had a headache and those that legitimately had one? This is the reason why most injury claims end up in court.

Get a great Bodily Injury E-book for more key information.

Claim adjusters are trained (some more than others) to understand most types of injuries. They know the most common conditions that come out of a car accident.

Their training is by no means technical or anything more than looking over medical dictionaries and reading medical records (things we can do).

Although these individuals (I was one of them) know about injuries, they are ill trained to evaluate pain. None of them have any kind of medical qualification to make any kind of assessment about the pain of an injury.

So what do they evaluate then? How do they come to a value? Great question, but before I answer it I will caution against different scams out there.

Many people will try to sell you software, eBooks, Books, Courses and other materials that give you the formula that insurance companies use to settle claims like yours. There is no formula.

I personally sell a book on negotiation and try to guide my readers on how to evaluate their own claim and then learn to negotiate their strong points and down play their weak ones.

Many attorneys try to multiply by 2 or 3 the amount of the medical bills and then come up to a value for pain and suffering.

This is not the way to look at pain and suffering. Some injuries that have little medical expenses can have a big impact in someone�s life. For example, a 14 year old girl with ten stitches on her face would cause embarrassment in probably on of the most important years of her life (high school).

The cost of ten stitches is low and multiplying this by two or three will not yield the amount of pain and suffering this girl will have. Even if you add some reconstructive surgery cost to the multiplication, the result would be less than it should.

Equally there are those accidents where the medical cost incurred is very high, but the injury yields no real pain. We all know about frivolous lawsuits.

The typical car accident where you �tap� the vehicle in front at one mile per hour at a traffic light causing no damage to either vehicle. The person in front calls an ambulance, gets X-Rays, and claims loss wages for 10 days plus $120,000 in pain.

The medical bills could add up to $3,000 to $4,000 (ambulance rides are expensive these days), and all the exams to make sure this person is ok.

Should your insurance company multiply the medical bills by two or three to come to a value of pain? This person would be entitled anywhere from $6,000 to $12,000 just for pain alone. I do not think that should be the case.

Do not be fooled into thinking that the examples above are the �extremes�. They are not. It is very common to see people in car accidents claiming injuries that never existed, and it is also common to see injuries that put a person into a coma. If that is the case then you need an attorney.

Evaluating pain should not be a matter of the multiplication of medical bills, and if it was, then there would be no need for insurance adjusters, lawyers, or websites like this one!

You are entitled to pain and suffering if the pain existed because of an injury.

You are not entitled to pain and suffering because of the accident. In other words, the inconvenience of having to rent a car, talk to adjusters, take statements, dealing with body shops, etc. is not compensated under �pain and suffering�. Pain and suffering will only cover pain for the injury (neck pain, back pain, etc.).

You are not entitled to recover pain and suffering if you cause the injury to yourself.

If you are driving and you negligence cause you to be harmed, your insurance will pay for your medical bills (provided that you have PIP coverage in your policy), but there would not be payment to you for pain and suffering. Your passengers however will be entitled to recover for this type of damage even if they are family member and/or spouses.

Bodily Injury E-book

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