Permanent Partial Disability

Mar 16, 2022 | Personal Injury

Permanent Partial Disability – When you’re placed at Maximum Medical Improvement (MMI), one of the benefits you’re entitled to is called Permanent Partial Disability or Impairment Rating, and it’s theoretically designed to compensate you for your future wage loss capacity, but they don’t take into account whether you’re working or not.

Permanent Partial Disability

What are the types of impairment ratings?

There are 2 types of impairment ratings that you can get, Scheduled Impairment Rating and Whole Person Impairment Rating. In 1991 the legislature made a list of body parts and assigned a value to each part. For example, if an arm is worth about $56,000 and you have a 10% impairment rating of the arm, you will get $5,600.

Whole Person injuries not on the list, so generally it’s anything other than legs and arms, like injuries to the spinal cord, injuries to the trunk or the head, and those impairments are not valued at a set value.

The whole person impairment is calculated with a different formula, it’s basically based on your age and your average weekly wage. The higher your age the less you get because they figure that if you’re injured at a younger age you have to live with the injury longer, and the higher your wage the higher the value of your whole person impairment rating.

What Impairment Rating is worth more?

In our experience the scheduled impairment rating is almost always worth less than a whole person impairment rating, often 3 to 4 times less, so if you’re injured you may have an injury which the doctor of the insurance company wants to say it’s a scheduled impairment, when it’s actually a whole person impairment.

The law has been left very vague about when an injury is or is not on the schedule, and judges have awarded more compensation because the restrictions go beyond just the arms or legs, in other words, they’ve converted the impairment rating from a scheduled injury to a whole person injury.

If there’s a doubt and the insurance company is wondering whether an injury should be a scheduled injury or a whole person injury, they will go with the scheduled injury because they will have to pay considerably less that way, so it’s important to have an attorney who can help you get more compensation.