Recently we’ve discussed some of the similarities between workers' compensation and personal injury claims. A component of any serious personal injury claim is the consideration of future medical treatment related to the injury. Does the worker’s compensation system take into account the cost of future medical care?
Personal injury and accident lawyers in Baltimore know that answer is resoundingly yes –the system overcompensates for it.
While that may seem like great news, any injured worker who has had a “medicare set aside” knows it’s not always great news. Any worker’s compensation settlement must take into account Medicare’s “interest” [i.e. will Medicare have to pay future medical costs that should have been recovered from the workers' compensation carrier].
Medicare’s own internal regulations suggest that if a claimant is not on medicare, and unlikely to be so for the next few years, then they will not 
even review that settlement if less than a quarter of a million dollars, to see if their interests are protected. Nevertheless Personal injury and accident lawyers in Baltimore MD have routinely seen that carriers, or the commission itself, insist on a “medical set aside” in vastly smaller cases. It is not uncommon to see these "set asides" consume a substantial portion of the settlement.
R.S. Baltimore, MD
