Public Health Law Map - Beta 5 - Medical and Public Health Law Site

simple as installing wheelchair ramps or as costly as buying the plaintiff a house to
ensure that his or her medical needs will be met. The plaintiff is also entitled to the
value of any property damaged as a result of the defendant’s conduct. This is
usually an automobile, but it may be a house (plane crash cases), a horse, or any
other property involved in the accident.
f) The Strategic Value of Medical Expenses
Medical expenses and lost wages are the most concrete elements of the plaintiff’s
damages. The plaintiff’s personal characteristics often undermine his or her lost
wage claims, but medical expense claims do not depend on the personal worth of
the plaintiff. In many medical malpractice cases, the medical expenses are the bulk
of the plaintiff’s damages, driving the enormous awards in cases involving brain-
damaged infants. Juries are not reticent about giving the plaintiff money to pay for
medical care. From their perspective, it is not a choice between the plaintiff’s or the
physician’s bearing the costs; it is a choice between the physician and society. The
jury may assume that if they do not give the plaintiff money to pay for medical care,
he or she is likely to become a ward of the state.
Medical expenses provide the most psychologically convincing evidence of
personal injuries. A long stay in the hospital and a projection of substantial future
medical needs add credibility to all of the other elements of the plaintiff’s case.
There is a rule of thumb in automobile accident cases that the cases should settle
for a multiple of the sum of the medical expenses and the plaintiff’s lost wages
(usually three to five times the sum).
2. Indirect Economic Damages
Indirect economic damages are those that do not have a ready monetary equivalent.
They fall into two classes: those that represent services that the injured person might
have provided to his or her family, and those that represent various aspects of mental
or physical suffering by the injured person or his or her family. Services include
home repairs, household services, and special services that the plaintiff might have
provided. The value of sexual services in a marriage are an important component in
these damages, but they are lumped with loss of companionship to form consortium.
This avoids the problem of presenting expert testimony on the value of sexual
services.
Defending against these noneconomic claims has pitfalls. If the defense disputes the
plaintiff’s pain but that pain is credible to the jury, the defendant will be seen as
cruel. Establishing that the plaintiff was a shiftless wife beater is unlikely to defuse
the testimony of a small child that he misses his daddy. The high ground in
defending these claims is to sympathize but to question the propriety of replacing
daddy with money. Inevitably, the award of indirect economic damages depends on
the jury’s balancing their sympathy for the plaintiff with their sympathy for the
defendant.
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