Life Care Plan

A life care plan is the plaintiff expert report that prices every future need caused by the injury. Each item gets a unit cost, a frequency and a duration, and an economist reduces the stream to present value using a discount rate and a medical cost inflation assumption.

It is frequently the largest single number in a senior care demand, and it behaves unusually here. Life expectancy is short, which should shrink the total, but the hourly rate assumed is high because the plan usually assumes one-to-one or two-to-one private duty care rather than facility-level ratios. A short projection at a very high hourly rate can exceed a long projection at a low one, which is why the productive attack is almost always on the level of care assumed rather than on the life expectancy. Two consequences for insurance. Retain a defense life care planner early rather than after the demand, so the mediator has two credible frameworks instead of one uncontested one. And note that a demand built this way grows over time even when the facts do not, so a tower sized against historical settled values is sized against a number the methodology has already made obsolete.