If a work-related injury or illness results in your inability to perform your regular job duties, your employer’s workers’ compensation insurance should provide you with temporary disability benefits to help with lost wages and all “reasonably necessary” medical treatment. In this context, reasonably necessary means whatever it takes to help you reach maximum medical improvement (MMI), not necessarily to restore you to your pre-accident condition.
If your doctors have determined that you have reached MMI, but you are still experiencing a loss of working capacity, you may be eligible to receive permanent disability benefits through workers’ compensation. Your impairment rating largely determines the value of these benefits. Understanding how your Santa Ana assessment of impairment ratings affects your workers’ compensation claim can be crucial to getting a favorable claim result, as can working closely with an experienced workers’ compensation lawyer.
You may be eligible for permanent total or partial disability benefits if you have experienced a permanently debilitating injury or illness at work in California. The amount of your benefit depends on the nature and severity of that injury. For example, total disability entails being entirely unable to hold any gainful employment ever again, which translates to an impairment rating of 100 percent.
Certain types of injuries automatically receive a disability rating of 100 percent in the state, including total blindness in both eyes, quadriplegia, and total loss of function in both arms. Permanent injuries in Santa Ana workers’ compensation claims are more commonly classified as only partially disabling, meaning the assessment of impairment rating will fall somewhere between one percent and 99 percent.
We should emphasize that the loss of actual bodily function is only one factor influencing how physicians assess permanent impairment ratings in Santa Ana workers’ comp claims. Other significant factors include your age at the time you got injured, the type of work you did, your capacity for obtaining new education and training to perform a different type of work, and how much of your disability as a whole was a direct result of your job-related accident rather than a preexisting condition.
California uses the AMA guides to rate most injuries in workers compensation. Doctors often overlook parts of the guides that may be more favorable to an injured worker than the one that was used to rate the case. Because of this, the doctor may need to be questioned either in writing or by deposition to clarify ratings that are assigned in a case.
The process medical professionals and insurance companies use to rate a disabling injury can be difficult to understand, even if you have experience with workers’ compensation claims. If you are completely new to seeking workers’ compensation benefits, your chances of successfully advocating for your rights and getting a fair rating that suits your needs may be slim.
Fortunately, our firm of knowledgeable workers’ compensation attorneys may be able to help with this and other aspects of the claims process. Call today to discuss your recovery options and get answers to further questions you may have about a Santa Ana assessment of impairment ratings.
