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Obstacles Encountered By Plaintiffs In Alberta March 5, 2019

If the injured victim of an accident in Alberta files a personal injury claim, that same individual becomes a plaintiff. If the accident involved the collision of two or more vehicles, the same plaintiff faces a few obstacles. Each of those obstacles has been created by members of Alberta’s legislature.

Motor Vehicle Claims Act

This puts a limit of $200,000 on the compensation awarded to any plaintiff. Personal injury lawyers in Red Deer complain that the legal authorities have kept the limit at that low figure for more than one decade.

SEF44 Family Endorsement

This is supposed to cover those situations where someone got hit by an uninsured or underinsured motorist. Unfortunately, it does a poor job of covering those situations. An injured driver often finds it hard to access the Endorsement’s funds.

Minor Injury Regulation

This puts a $4,000 cap on the amount that can be awarded to any accident victim that has sustained one or more minor injuries. That figure holds, even if the victim has sustained harm to dozens of spots on his or her body. Moreover, someone that hopes to make use of the MIR (minor injury regulation) must attend a certified medical exam (CME).

Those that attend such an exam stand a chance for having their medical problem designated as a major injury. That newer classification would then allow them to seek a compensation greater than $4,000. Those that do not attend the CME have eliminated one way by which an injured resident of Alberta can gain permission to seek more than $4,000.

Diagnostic Treatment Protocols

These dictate the type of treatment that must get used on a soft tissue injury. The victim that has suffered such an injury needs to go to 21 treatments over a period of 90 calendar days. Those must be the first 90 days that follow an injury-causing accident.

Rules on WAD injuries

Both WAD I and WAD II are considered minor injuries. In contrast to that categorization, WAD III is not a minor injury. Consequently, someone with WAD III cannot receive the 21 cost-free treatments provided by the MIR. Instead, he or she must pay for those same treatments, and then ask to be reimbursed.

Insurance Act Amendments

These state that a victim can get paid for net wage loss, as opposed to gross wage loss. In addition, the employer’s benefits and other collateral benefits must come from the victim’s settlement, which was supposed to act as compensation for all the victim’s losses.

Mandatory Accident Benefits

These benefits must be offered with every car insurance policy that gets sold in Alberta. Unfortunately, drivers complain that each of the benefits are hard to access, and also extremely low.