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Car accidents, sports injuries and other mishaps cause approxmiately 1.7 million traumatic brain injuries per year in the United States. Roughly 90,000 of these result in permanent brain damage, forever impacting the accident victim’s life.
The good news is that there are many forms of treatment available today for brain injuries, including specialized rehabilitation centers throughout the country that deal specifically with brain injury patients. However, paying for the treatment poses a problem for many families.
Unfortunately, many insurance companies have declined to cover the cognitive rehabilitation that is often recommended after a brain injury to retrain the brain and restore brainpower. This is especially true for patients whose recovery appears to have reached a plateau.
Because brain injury patients are often told that they have somewhere around 18 months to regain the memory and skills that were lost in the accident, losing health insurance coverage half-way through treatment or never having it to begin with can be nearly as tragic as the accident itself.
Sadly, rehab is often “incomplete” among people with severe brain injuries, according to a 2011 U.S. Institute of Medicine report, which also stated that “many patients may not receive prescribed treatments due to limitations in payer plans.”
One way that brain injury patients can attempt to secure the money they need for treatment is through personal injury lawsuits. A plaintiff in a personal injury lawsuit can not only ask for damages to cover medical expenses that have already occurred but also future medical expenses, including rehab.
For this reason, many people who have been injured in accidents caused by negligence choose to sue the negligent parties as doing so may be the only way to make sure they can pay for the rehab they so desperately need.
Source: turnto23.com, “Brain injury patients fight for therapy time and money,” Jeremy Olson, Aug. 19, 2013