The most dangerous moment in a personal injury claim is the moment the insurance adjuster slides a check across the table and asks you to sign a release.
To the untrained eye, the number on that check may look significant. It covers the ambulance ride and the emergency room bill. It pays for the surgery you just had and maybe puts a little extra in your pocket for the weeks you missed at work. It feels like a win, and it feels like closure.
However, if you have suffered a permanent or catastrophic injury, that check is often a trap.
In Texas personal injury law, insurance companies will typically only pay the victim one time, and it is in exchange for a release claims. They will not pay piecemeal through the claim. This means you only get one chance to resolve your claim. Once you sign a release of liability your case is closed forever. If you need a revision surgery in five years, you must pay for it yourself. If you develop traumatic arthritis in ten years, you pay for it yourself. If you are forced into early retirement in fifteen years because your body gives out, you are on your own.
This is why Snellings Injury Law works hard to understand the full impact of our clients’ injuries, including the long-term consequences.
The Trap of Accepting a Settlement Based Only on Past Medical Bills
Insurance adjusters are trained to evaluate claims based on a snapshot of the present. When they evaluate your file, they look primarily at your Past Medical Expenses, which are the bills you have already generated.
They will tally up the cost of your initial hospitalization, your physical therapy sessions, and your prescriptions. They will then offer you a settlement based on these expenses with perhaps a small multiplier for pain and suffering. They will tell you that this offer makes you whole.
This approach ignores the fundamental medical reality of trauma. A severe injury is rarely fixed with a single procedure. The human body is a mechanical system. When one part is damaged or altered, it affects the entire machine over time. By focusing only on the bills you have today, the insurance company is effectively asking you to pay for the other driver’s negligence with your own future retirement savings.
Why Seemingly Healed Injuries Often Fail Years After the Accident
To understand the true value of a case, we must 10, or 20 or even 30 years into the future. Based on medical data and the thousands of cases we have handled, we know that “healed” injuries often deteriorate long after the lawsuit is over.
Orthopedic Hardware Failure
If your accident required surgery involving plates or screws or rods, you have a foreign object inside your body. While titanium is durable, it is not invincible. Screws can back out over time and cause soft tissue irritation, or nerve damage. Metal fatigue can cause rods or plates to snap under years of stress. Many clients develop severe and chronic pain in the hardware site during cold weather, which requires lifetime pain management. A significant percentage of hardware eventually needs to be surgically removed or replaced. This is a procedure that costs tens of thousands of dollars and requires weeks of recovery time.
Adjacent Segment Disease
This is common in spinal injury cases involving fusions. When a surgeon fuses two vertebrae together, those vertebrae no longer move. This forces the vertebrae above and below the fusion to work twice as hard to maintain the range of motion in your neck or back. Over a period of five to ten years, this added stress causes the adjacent discs to degenerate rapidly. A client who settles for a single fusion today often ends up needing a second or third fusion a decade later. If your settlement did not account for that, you will be left paying out of pocket.
Post-Traumatic Arthritis Trauma
If you shatter a knee or fracture a hip or crush an ankle, you have damaged the articular cartilage, and it will accelerate aging. Even if the bone heals perfectly, the joint surface is often no longer smooth. This friction leads to Post-Traumatic Osteoarthritis. We frequently represent clients in their 30s who now have the joints of a 60-year-old because of a crash. They will likely require a total joint replacement decade earlier than the average person.
Medical Inflation Will Destroy the Value of Your Settlement Over Time
Even if an insurance company agrees to pay for a future surgery, they will try to calculate the cost using today’s prices. They will look at what a knee replacement costs right now and offer you that exact amount.
Medical inflation historically outpaces general economic inflation. The cost of healthcare services in the United States rises by roughly 4.5% to 7% annually. A surgery that costs $40,000 in 2026 could easily cost $85,000 or more by the time you actually need it in 2040.
If your attorney does not calculate the Future Value of these medical services using proper economic models, you will be left with the bill for the difference. We work with medical experts and economists to ensure that the money you receive today is enough to purchase the healthcare you need tomorrow.
How We Use Life Care Plans to Prove Future Damages with Certainty
We cannot simply guess at these future numbers when presenting them to a jury. Under Texas law, we must prove damages with reasonable probability. To do this, we employ a retained expert known as a Life Care Planner.
A Life Care Planner is typically a doctor or a certified rehabilitation nurse with advanced training in the long-term costs of disability. They review your entire medical file, consult with your treating surgeons, and conduct an interview with you about your daily limitations.
They then produce a comprehensive report that creates a roadmap for your medical future. A Life Care Plan does not just list surgeries. It accounts for every penny you will need to live with your injury. This includes routine diagnostics like annual MRIs or X-rays to monitor hardware stability. It includes therapeutic modalities such as annual physical therapy tune-ups to maintain mobility. It calculates the lifetime cost of medication for pain management. It also factors in home modifications like installing wheelchair ramps or widening doorways to accommodate your injuries.
We present this Life Care Plan to the defense to force them to stop arguing about “simple whiplash” and start confronting the actual reality of your condition.
How Insurance Companies Try to Deny Future Medical Claims
When we present a Life Care Plan, insurance companies rarely just write the check. They have a specific playbook for attacking future damages.
Defense attorneys often argue that future damages are speculative. They will tell the jury that nobody knows if the plaintiff will really need this surgery, or if they might get injured in a different accident tomorrow. We counter this by relying on the Reasonable Probability standard. We do not have to prove the future with 100% certainty. We only must prove that it is more likely than not that this medical care will be necessary, based on the expert opinions of your doctors.
Another common tactic is the investment argument. The defense will argue that if you invest your settlement money, the interest alone will pay for your medical care, so they should not have to pay for inflation. We use offset calculations to show that safe and conservative investments often barely keep up with the skyrocketing rate of medical inflation. You should not be forced to gamble your medical money in the stock market just to afford a surgery that the defendant made necessary.
Securing Your Financial Stability Before You Sign a Release
You did not ask to be injured. You did not ask to manage a lifetime of chronic pain or navigate a complex medical system. The goal of a personal injury settlement is not to make you rich. It is to put you back as you were to the best extent possible.
If you settle without a full understanding of your potential future care needs, you are gambling with your future quality of life. At Snellings Injury Law, we treat the case closing with the gravity it deserves.
If you have a permanent injury, you might need medical care for the rest of your life. A Life Care Planner creates a detailed roadmap of every doctor’s visit, surgery, medication, and therapy you will need in the future. They calculate the cost of this care over your lifetime, so that we can ask for that money now. Without this plan, you might settle for too little, be left to pay out of pocket years down the road. Do not let an insurance adjuster rush you into a regret that will last a lifetime.
If you’ve been injured and need help figuring out what to do next, visit our website to learn more, or schedule a free consultation to get your next steps.
