Personal injury news roundup: 7 days ended 22 July 2014:
The idea of ‘you win some, you lose some’ in personal injury claims is deadly serious, since so much is riding on the line; nevertheless lawyers sometimes fail.
Now, don’t get me wrong – a lot of the time personal injury lawyers win the cases they take on for their clients. When it comes to high profile ones it’s even more prevalent. In fact, the news this week was positive in that regard; it turns out a German aircraft engineering worker that had suffered major injuries during an accident at an airport on British soil finally received somewhere around £600,000 in personal injury compensation. The poor bloke actually lost both one of his arms and one of his legs due to the incident, and it’s been four long, arduous years since the incident, but he’s finally been given his compensation award.
So that’s the good news – the bad news is that there are plenty of personal injury claims – especially work accident claims – that don’t go nearly as smoothly. I know it sounds absurd to think that a man who’s lost the use of two limbs and had to wait four bloody years before he could see some sort of resolution on his accident claim as smooth sailing, but at least the man got his day in court; all too many injured people are simply denied an opportunity altogether.
This phenomenon is incredibly prevalent in the world of hearing loss and hearing damage-related injury claims, for example. Did you know that some 80 per cent of all claims regarding hearing loss are outright rejected by the UK’s largest insurer? Aviva says that these dismissed claims are most likely fraud based on the fact that claims figures for hearing loss have increased by more than two thirds to around 80,000 last year – and that the claims that are permitted usually cost the insurance industry anywhere from £300 million on the low side to half a billion pounds on the more expensive end of the spectrum.
Honestly I don’t know how Aviva or any other insurer makes determinations as to whether a hearing loss claim is fraudulent or not. All I can tell you is that living with a hearing disability – or living with someone who has a distinct hearing impairment is no fun, and hearing aids aren’t exactly cheap.