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.
Maximize your impairment rating payout in Colorado.
What are the types of impairment ratings?
There are 2 types of impairment ratings that you can get: the Scheduled Impairment Rating and the Whole Person Impairment Rating.
In 1991, the legislature compiled a list of body parts and assigned a value to each. 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 using a different formula; it’s based on your age and 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 that the doctor of the insurance company wants to say is 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 extend 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.
We’re here to help
Workplace injuries change your life. If you’re dealing with a permanent disability in Colorado, let the team at Kaplan Morrell handle the legal complexities so you can focus on recovery.
Call or text us at 970 356 9898; all of our consultations are free and confidential.
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