Damages for non-economic losses are damages for pain and suffering, emotional distress, loss of consortium or companionship, and other tangible injuries. These damages involve no direct economic loss and have no precise value. Opponents of this type of reform have claimed that limits on non-economic damages will hurt women, children and senior citizens. However, calculations exist that help juries determine economic damages for all injured parties. Expert economists and life care planners are used in most personal injury cases to provide juries with calculations as to the cost of future medical care created by an injury. The cost of future medical care created by an injury does not only include costs for medical services, physical therapy, continued treatment, and medicine, but the cost of future medical care also includes costs for things such as installing ramps in a house or installing rails in bathtub or shower.

Opponents would like you to believe that women and children are not compensated for lost wages because they may not work outside the home; that is just not true. Expert and life care planners also provide juries calculations as to wage loss. Economists provide these calculations for all types of plaintiffs, regardless of whether the plaintiff is a stay at home mom, a child, a woman running her own business or a man who stays at home to raise the children. Important daily tasks, such as cleaning the house, running errands, taking the kids to after-school activities, buying groceries or making dinner are all taken into consideration and included in a calculation for lost future earnings. Such calculations can be very high. Further, future earnings are just one calculation of economic loss; it is not the only factor that goes into determining a plaintiff’s economic damage reward.

It is very difficult for juries to assign a dollar value to these non-economic losses, given the minimal guidelines they customarily receive from the court. Juries awarding non-economic damages are generally not subject to any constraints on their discretion – either substantively or procedurally.

The legal standards for assessing pain and suffering damages are imprecise. Evidence of pain and suffering plays on jurors’ emotions, not their sense of logic. Because jurors’ judgment on these issues is believed to represent the very sense of the community that justifies the jury system in the first place, trial judges are hesitant to reduce the amount of pain and suffering post-trial. Furthermore, the traditionally subjective nature of types of damage awards makes them difficult to consider on appellate review.

Pain and suffering damages are intended to compensate the plaintiff for past and future pain and suffering and anguish. They should not be twisted into a covert punitive damages substitute. Because no constitutional guideposts help assess non-economic damages awards, these awards tend to be erratic and, because of highly charged environment of personal injury trials, excessive. Awards tend to vary depending on the jury and the location of the trial.

Reasonable parameters, identical to those implemented by the Ohio Legislature in Senate Bill 281 (the medical malpractice bill), should be implemented to apply to all tort actions to prevent non-economic damages awards from “running wild” in Ohio.

28 states have imposed some sort of limitation or cap on noneconomic damages in civil actions and/or medical malpractice actions.

Map data compiled by the Ohio Alliance for Civil Justice