Opinion ID: 853638
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Valuation[15]of the Injury

Text: We have referred to a reduced probability of survival and diminished life-expectancy as two terms for the same concept. This requires some explanation. In the Alexanders' case, let us assume the jury concludes from the expert testimony that before the failure to diagnose she had a seventy percent chance of full recovery and a normal life expectancy. As already noted, this is a statistical proposition that seventy of 100 patients with JoAnn's initial condition will have a normal lifetime. To take the simplest example first, assume that there is a 100% chance of successful treatment if there were no negligence. Leaving aside any other individual factors, the patient's life expectancy is the median of our collective experience as to the age at death of persons of her age and gender. Otherwise stated, a life expectancy is no more than the composite of the remaining lives of a large number of people, some of whom will die the next day and some of whom will become nonagenarians. Here, at the time of diagnosis, the expert testimony put her chance of survival for five years at approximately twenty percent. To be comparable to her pre-negligence expectancy, it must be converted, which we assume can be done, into a comparable median lifetime or expectancy. A person with a normal life expectancy has only a fifty percent chance of attaining that expectancy. Even if we reduce both the before and after numbers to comparables, the problem identified earlier remains: expectancy is itself a statistical proposition, and compensating on the basis of expectancy will either overcompensate or undercompensate depending on how long the plaintiff actually lives. Finally, if we take as our starting point not a normal life expectancy, but the expectancy of someone with an already heightened risk, the analysis is the same, but both the before and after numbers require a conversion of probability of survival into an expectancy. Presumably we do not have statistics that permit confident evaluation of the anticipated life span of patients with many conditions to the same degree that mortality tables give those values for the general population. Despite these difficulties, and recognizing that it can produce a windfall for some and shortchange others, we have compensated for reduced life expectancy in other contexts. [16] Application of the same principles is the best we can do to value the reduced probability of a full recovery. [17] This would value the injury at the reduction of the patient's expectancy from her pre-negligence expectancy. Ultimately, the jury will have to attach a monetary amount to JoAnn's loss. In so doing, because this is JoAnn's action, the jury will be forced to consider what value to ascribe to the privilege of living. In other contexts, juries are routinely entrusted with the task of awarding damages for injuries not readily calculable. See Indianapolis Newspapers, Inc. v. Fields, 254 Ind. 219, 219-20, 259 N.E.2d 651, 656 (1970) (jury awarded $60,000 in libel suit); Miller v. Ryan, 706 N.E.2d 244, 247 (Ind.Ct.App.1999) (jury awarded $325,000 in informed consent claim); Dollar Inn, Inc. v. Slone, 695 N.E.2d 185, 187 (Ind.Ct.App.1998) (jury awarded $250,000 in emotional distress damages to plaintiff who was pricked in the thumb by a hypodermic needle concealed in toilet paper roll). Valuing a determinable number of years of life is no more challenging than these exercises.