Permanent Partial Disability Benefits

Because workers’ compensation laws are different in each state (there is no overruling federal program to run it), the same injury and situation may be treated very different in different states. Permanent partial disability is often difficult to classify and assign a dollar amount to, and this is the case for a variety of reasons.

In general, permanent partial disability results when an injury causes a worker to no longer be able to perform some of the tasks of their previous job, and that this will stay the case indefinitely. The difference in wages from their new abilities to their old job is usually considered when dealing with a workers’ compensation case.

There are two broad approaches to this problem: an individual justice and an average justice model. The individual justice model examines each case on its own and tries to determine exactly how much wage potential was lost and makes an effort to compensate the worker based on that. This is a far more expensive approach, even if it seems more equitable in the long run.

The average justice model, on the other hand, tries to group together similar workers with similar injuries and determine a kind of average compensation based on those brackets. This is much cheaper, but results in some situations of overpayment or underpayment in different circumstances.

Contact Us

If you have any questions about permanent partial disability, or any other workers’ compensation topic, contact the Pennsylvania workers’ compensation lawyers of Lowenthal & Abrams, P.C. by calling 610-667-7511 today.