Category: Car Accidents

Knowing how to calculate pain and suffering in a car accident settlement can help you understand what compensation to expect in your case. If you are injured in a car accident in Pennsylvania, the chances are that you will suffer not only financial damages, but also physical and emotional damages along with pain and suffering, disfigurement and loss of life’s pleasures that can impact your life even more severely than your financial loss.  One court has said that the so-called noneconomic damages represent the iceberg, with the economic damages only the tip of the iceberg.  Determining how to calculate pain and suffering and other non-economic damages in a car accident settlement is much more challenging than calculating economic costs, such as lost wages, lost wage horizon, medical, hospital, and rehabilitative bills, and property damage. If another party’s negligence or responsibility was involved in the accident, you should be entitled to receive financial compensation that covers pain and suffering, disfigurement, emotional distress and loss of life’s pleasures as Pennsylvania law allows you to recover both economic and non-economic losses from the at-fault party who caused the crash. However, insurance companies have…

Three Things You Should Not Have to Worry About When You Hire a Capable Car Accident Attorney If you have been in a car crash in Pennsylvania, you probably have lots of worries. Your first priority should be taking care of your injuries, but there are also worries about your financial situation and how the crash will affect your future and your family. You worry about paying your bills and your living costs, especially if the injury affects your ability to work and you no longer have a vehicle. Then there is the stress of dealing with insurance companies. What if you say something wrong and it damages your case? How do you know how much your settlement is worth and whether to agree to what the insurance company offers? You will want to know what underinsurance is. You will need to know if you have signed any waivers or sign-downs reducing your underinsurance coverage. You will need to know about the insurance coverage of the other driver or drivers. You will want to know whether the other driver who was at fault for the accident was at work and, if so,…

Depending on the circumstances of your accident and insurance coverage, your health care coverage provider may require you to reimburse them for the payments it has made on your medical bills out of the money you recover for your injuries. This is a process called "subrogation." In a decision that had a huge and immediate impact on the way auto accident cases are litigated, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ruled that HMOs have the right under Pennsylvania law to assert a subrogation claim against an accident victim's tort recovery. In Wirth v. Aetna U.S. Health Care, plaintiffs lawyers argued that the Pennsylvania Motor Vehicle Financial Responsibility Law (MVFRL) prohibits subrogation in all auto accident cases, and that their clients therefore shouldn't be forced to dip into their settlements or verdicts to reimburse the insurers for any medical bills. But the HMOs argued that Pennsylvania's HMO Act makes them exempt from MVFRL's anti-subrogation provision. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court sided with the HMOs, holding that MVFRL's anti-subrogation provision does not apply to them because the HMO Act exempts them from any insurance law that does not specifically state that it covers HMOs.…