California authority has long recognized medical costs may impact the assessment of general damages. In Helfend v. Southern California Rapid Transit District, the California Supreme Court observed: “[T]he cost of medical care often provides both attorneys and juries in tort cases with an important measure for assessing the plaintiff’s general damages.”[1] However, an increasingly common strategy in personal injury litigation is for plaintiffs to waive recovery of past medical expenses while continuing to seek substantial awards for future medical care and noneconomic damages. The strategic benefit is apparent. By removing comparatively modest past medical expenses from the case, a plaintiff may prevent the jury from considering those expenses as an objective reference point when evaluating substantially larger claims for future care and pain and suffering. Defense must respond appropriately.

Defense counsel should be prepared to challenge efforts to invoke Corenbaum v. Lampkin as establishing that evidence concerning reasonable past medical expenses is categorically inadmissible once recovery of those expenses has been waived.  Corenbaum addressed the admissibility of amounts billed but never incurred as recoverable damages.[2] It did not hold that the reasonable and recoverable value of medical care actually received becomes irrelevant merely because a plaintiff elects not to seek those expenses as an element of damages.

In Corenbaum, the court held evidence of the full amount billed for past medical services was inadmissible where medical providers had accepted lesser amounts as full payment.[3] Because the full billed amounts did not represent the reasonable value of the services provided, the court concluded those amounts were likewise irrelevant to determining the reasonable value of future medical services.[4] The court similarly rejected the use of otherwise inadmissible billed amounts merely to provide counsel with an “argumentative construct” for calculating noneconomic damages.[5]

The significance of plaintiff’s strategic approach is revealing in particular when a plaintiff seeks substantial future medical expenses. Future medical damages must reflect the reasonable value of medical services reasonably certain to be necessary in the future.[6] Where the claimed future care consists of the same or similar treatment already received, evidence concerning the reasonable cost of that treatment may bear directly on the valuation of the claimed future care, irrespective of whether the plaintiff seeks reimbursement for the past expense itself.

A plaintiff’s waiver of past economic damages may limit the relief sought, but it does not necessarily resolve the separate question of what evidence is relevant to the damages which remain at issue. Defense counsel should therefore distinguish Corenbaum’s exclusion of unrecoverable billed amounts from the distinct question whether reasonable past medical costs remain relevant to future medical expenses or noneconomic damages. A waiver of one category of damages should not, without further analysis, operate as a means of excluding otherwise relevant evidence bearing on the valuation of the damages the plaintiff continues to pursue.

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Sources

[1]  Helfend v. S. Cal. Rapid Transit Dist. (1970) 2 Cal.3d 1, 11.

[2] Corenbaum v. Lampkin (2013) 215 Cal.App.4th 1308, 1330-4.

[3] Id. at 1330-3

[4] Id. at 1330-1.

[5] Id. at 1333.

[6] Id. at 1332.