Ensuring Your Benefits Under Minnesota Workers’ Compensation

Any employee whose injury or illness is work-related is covered by workers’ compensation. Those employer-paid benefits may include:

• Medical expenses — All reasonable and necessary medical treatment arising from the injury, including mileage to medical appointments
• Temporary disability — Wage replacement pay while you are off the job recovering or supplemental pay if you return to work at reduced wage
• Permanent disability — Compensation for permanent damage to your body that leaves you partially disabled or unable to ever work again
• Vocational rehabilitation — Retraining and assistance for returning to your pre-injury job or finding a new line of work that fits within your new physical abilities
• Survivor benefits (death benefits) — Reimbursement for funeral and burial expenses of person who died from work-related injuries, and payments to dependent survivors

Our job at Thill & Freeman, PLLC is to help you obtain and protect all entitled benefits, and to make sure your wage loss is accurately determined. Our attorney, Mark Freeman, has been advocating for injured workers for more than 30 years.

How Are Workers’ Compensation Benefits Determined?

While medical care for all injuries sustained on the job is covered under workers’ compensation, the amount of benefits for which any given injured worker qualifies varies from case to case. Workers’ comp is set up to compensate injured workers for lost income/wages. Benefits are paid at a rate of two-thirds of a worker’s average weekly wage, which is helped by the fact these benefits are not taxable.

In the event that the worker sustains a permanent disability, it may be possible to reach cash settlement or the worker may opt to continue receiving weekly checks, depending on circumstances. Permanent total disability is based on your average wages. Permanent partial disability is factored on the specific body part, the percentage of impairment and your weekly wages.

Make Sure Your Benefits Have Been Calculated Correctly

If you are working through these issues, it is extremely important to correctly value the benefits to which you may be entitled. At Thill & Freeman, PLLC, our lawyer can help you correctly determine the value of your wage loss benefits and other damages.

Because Mr. Freeman worked for years valuing workers’ compensation claims for a workers’ comp insurance company, we know how these companies calculate benefits and their methods for undervaluing workers’ claims. We understand how to counter these tactics and how to accurately value the following:

• Diagnostic tests (MRIs, CTs, EMGs)
• Physical therapy
• Surgery
• Counseling
• Medical bills
• Rehabilitation expenses
• Reconstructive surgery
• Lost wages
• Temporary and permanent disability benefits

It is important to note that cases involving a permanent impairment and total disability claim and/or survivor dependency benefits have their own unique issues. Working with our attorney can help ensure that you obtain all the benefits to which you are entitled.

Let’s Get Your Benefits Right

We help people on the front end of workers’ comp claims to ensure they get full benefits. We can also intervene if your benefits have been denied, calculated incorrectly or terminated.

Schedule a free initial consultation to discuss a serious work injury with our St. Louis Park workers’ comp claim lawyer by calling 952-232-1752 or emailing the firm.