Cost Per Pound Of Flesh And Bone: What You Lose In An Accident Should Be Paid For
Surrogates are paid to borrow their wombs to incubate children. Men sell their sperm to sperm banks. Cadavers are sold to universities and teaching hospitals. If there is a legal market for body parts, the trade of money for flesh and bone continues.
Ergo, if you are in a car/truck/motorcycle accident, and the other driver causes you to lose flesh, muscle, bone, and tissue, why should they not pay? If you had ended up in a morgue, and your family gave their permission, your body would have been sold for education purposes. Being alive and having lost parts of your self to another vehicle and driver should also be paid for, and that is where an accident lawyer comes in. Here is how courts decide the cost per pound of flesh bone based on what you have lost.
Loss of an Upper Extremity
Arms help you do so much. You use your hands and arms to carry just about everything, lift almost everything, and move smaller objects around. When you only have one hand, you can only manage half what you used to manage. When you lose an arm at the elbow or above, you no longer have the ability to use that side of your body for most jobs. Your lawyer has a disability formula into which you plug the factors of loss of work doing what you could do before minus the percentage of available jobs you can do now without that upper extremity. The difference in income is what that upper arm was worth. However, if you lost an upper and lower extremity, that amount might either double or the amount might be split between the missing limbs.
Loss of a Lower Extremity
Unless your career or your job for which you were educated and trained relies heavily on your legs and feet, you could probably manage without that lower limb just fine. It is not the same as losing an upper limb because a lower limb can be replaced with a prosthetic that helps you maintain your balance, your ability to move and walk and even run, and even keep your ability to stand without extra support. If you only lose a lower limb, the calculation for its loss is a little different. You will be paid for its loss, of course, but usually to the tune of physical therapy costs, fittings for prosthetic limbs, and all the time you have to take off from work to learn how to move with your prosthetic.
Loss of Sight/Facial Features
Sight is important to practically everything humans do. If the accident made you blind, you can sue the other driver for your average salary of the last ten years in perpetuity of your life. Bone structure and facial muscles inhibit your life too, and for that you can sue for about half your annual wages for a few decades, plus damages.
For more information, contact an accident lawyer in your area.