Michigan Life Care Plans and Future Medical Costs

Someone in your family will need care for the rest of their life, and what you want to know is whether the money will be there. That answer comes from a document, not an argument.

The document is a life care plan: a costed account of the care your family member will need, written by a credentialed professional based on the treating physicians’ recommendations. It is usually the largest part of the claim.

The National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center estimates the lifetime cost of high tetraplegia for a person injured at 25 at roughly $6.4 million in 2025 dollars, with paraplegia at about $3.1 million and a motor functional injury at about $2.1 million. Those figures cover care and equipment only, excluding lost wages and lost productivity entirely.

Catastrophic injury attorneys at Vahdat Weisman Law handle catastrophic injury cases across Michigan. Call (734) 469-4994 for a free consultation. No attorney fee unless we recover for you.

Do Michigan’s Damages Caps Limit Future Care Costs?

No. They reach pain and suffering, nothing else.

Michigan caps noneconomic damages in medical malpractice and product liability cases. For 2026, the Department of Treasury set those figures at $596,400 and, for the statutes’ higher tiers, $1,065,000. Both statutes cap “the total amount of damages for noneconomic loss.” MCL 600.1483 also requires that damages be itemized into economic and non-economic loss, and MCL 600.2946a uses the same limitation.

Future medical care, attendant care, equipment, home modification, therapy, and lost earning capacity are economic damages, and they are not capped. Your whole life care plan sits outside the cap, which is why it should not be assembled shortly before mediation.

What a Life Care Plan Is and Who Writes It

A life care plan is a dynamic document, built on published standards of practice, comprehensive assessment, data analysis and research, setting out a person’s current and future medical needs and the cost of meeting them.

The credential to look for is Certified Life Care Planner, awarded by the International Commission on Health Care Certification, which has administered it since 1996 and is accredited through the ANSI National Accreditation Board. Certification requires a qualified healthcare professional background, at least 120 post-graduate training hours, and three years of field experience in the preceding five, with recertification every five years. A separate credential, the Certified Physician Life Care Planner, exists for physicians and, in 2024, expanded beyond physical medicine and rehabilitation to all recognized specialties. The International Academy of Life Care Planners published the current Standards of Practice, fourth edition, in 2022.

Your plan will typically address specialist evaluations, functional assessments, equipment and assistive devices, home and vehicle modifications, medications and supplies, ongoing care and diagnostics, projected complications and future surgeries, vocational needs, and attendant or nursing care.

What gets a plan admitted or excluded is its foundation. Every recommendation must be supported by the medical records, the treating providers’ own recommendations, clinical practice guidelines and peer-reviewed literature, and current pricing data for where your family lives. A life care planner does not prescribe. A plan recommending a surgery no physician has recommended has a gap in its foundation, and that gap is a standard basis for a reliability challenge.

How a Court Turns Future Care Into a Number

Findings on future damages. A jury does not return one lump figure. MCL 600.6305(1) requires a verdict or judgment in a personal injury action to include specific findings of past economic and non-economic damages, and of “any future damages and the periods over which they will accrue, on an annual basis,” broken into three categories: medical and other costs of health care; lost wages, earning capacity and other economic loss; and non-economic loss. That means annual accrual periods, not a separate line item for every individual year. Subsection (2) requires that the calculation be based on the costs and losses “during the period of time the plaintiff will survive.”

A statutory discount rate of five percent. Future care is awarded in today’s dollars, so the total is reduced. MCL 600.6306 sets the order in which judgment is entered, and subsection (2) defines “gross present cash value” as the total amount of future damages reduced to present value at a rate of 5 percent per year. That reduction uses simple interest, not compound, and over a long plan the difference is not small. Future damages under section 6306 “are to be reduced to present cash value using the same simple interest that has been employed under the common law for at least eighty years in Michigan” (Nation v. W.D.E. Electric Co., 454 Mich. 489 (1997)). Compounding the reduction would understate the award. Medical malpractice judgments are entered under a separate section, MCL 600.6306a.

Periodic payment over $250,000. The future-care money may not arrive as one check. Where future damages exceed $250,000 in gross present cash value, the defendant or its liability insurer must satisfy that portion by buying an annuity contract from a licensed life insurer (MCL 600.6307).

Collateral sources, and the lien exception. What health insurance already paid can be subtracted. After verdict and before entry of judgment, the defense may show the court that an expense or loss was paid or is payable by a collateral source, and the court reduces the judgment (MCL 600.6303). Collateral sources include health insurance, employee benefits, Social Security, workers’ compensation and Medicare. Life insurance is expressly excluded. So are benefits paid by someone entitled by law or contract to a lien, properly exercised, which keeps you from being reduced twice: once by the setoff and again by repaying the lien.

How long the plan runs matters as much as what is in it. Life expectancy starts from the CDC’s United States Life Tables, most recently published in July 2025 for 2023 data, which give general-population figures by age, sex and race. That figure is then adjusted where the injury itself shortens life expectancy, using condition-specific data. For spinal cord injury, the reductions are substantial, documented by the National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center rather than the CDC tables: a person injured at 20 who survives the first year has an additional life expectancy of roughly 32 years with high tetraplegia, 43.8 years with paraplegia, and 51.4 years with a motor functional injury.

Will No-Fault Pay for All of It?

Often it will not. Four features of the statute explain why.

Michigan’s 2019 no-fault reform imposed a medical fee schedule. Under MCL 500.3157, for treatment rendered after July 1, 2021, insurers pay a declining percentage of the Medicare-payable amount: 200 percent initially, then 195 percent, and 190 percent for treatment after July 1, 2023, with higher tiers for qualifying facilities and trauma centers. For services Medicare does not cover, the insurer pays a percentage of what the provider charged as of January 1, 2019, stepping from 55 percent down to 52.5 percent after July 1, 2023.

There is a limit on what an insurer must pay for family-provided attendant care at home, set at 56 hours per week by cross-reference to the workers’ compensation statute. It limits the insurer’s payment obligation rather than the care itself, and MCL 500.3157(11) permits contracting for more. See our attendant care and replacement services page.

There is your coverage level. Since the reform, Michigan drivers choose a PIP medical limit under MCL 500.3107c: $50,000 for certain Medicaid enrollees, $250,000, $500,000, or unlimited, with unlimited applying by default where no selection is made. Benefits through the Michigan Assigned Claims Plan are limited to $250,000, set by cross-reference rather than stated as a number in that section.

And there is MCL 500.3145, which limits what you can still recover no matter what the plan shows. Under subsection (1), an action for benefits cannot begin more than one year after the accident unless written notice of injury was given within that year or the insurer previously paid benefits for the injury. Subsection (2) separately bars recovery of any loss incurred more than one year before the action was filed, measured from the date of the most recent allowable expense, work loss, or survivor’s loss. Subsection (3) tolls that one-year-back period from the date the insurer receives a specific claim for payment until it formally denies the claim, where the claim is pursued with reasonable diligence.

A plan priced at market rates can far exceed what no-fault will reimburse. If your limit is $250,000 and the plan runs into the millions, that gap is what the liability case has to close.

One exception matters. If your family member was injured before June 11, 2019, the 2019 amendments do not apply, because the scope of PIP benefits vests at the time of injury and the amendments did not retroactively modify vested contractual rights (Andary v USAA Casualty Insurance Company, Docket No. 164772 (Mich, July 31, 2023)). The Court limited its holding to MCL 500.3157(7) and (10). A published 2025 Court of Appeals decision, Fremont Insurance Co v Lighthouse Outpatient Center, applied that reasoning to the rest of the amended MCL 500.3157 fee schedule for people injured before that date, and the Department of Insurance and Financial Services then stated that no part of the amended fee schedule applies to that group. For those families, a life care plan can be funded at pre-reform rates. [ATTORNEY REVIEW: confirm the Fremont Insurance Co v Lighthouse Outpatient Center docket number, reporter citation, and the date and form of the DIFS statement before publication.]

What Medicare Will Want From the Settlement

If your family member has Medicare, or is reasonably expected to have it, the Medicare Secondary Payer statute obligates the parties to consider Medicare’s interest in future injury-related care.

There is no CMS review or approval process for liability Medicare set-asides. The published CMS program addresses workers’ compensation, and the proposed federal rule on liability set-asides was withdrawn. Practice varies, and anyone who tells you a liability set-aside must be submitted to CMS for approval is describing a process that does not exist.

The obligation itself does not disappear, and how the future medical allocation is documented in your settlement has consequences for Medicare eligibility years later. It belongs in your planning, before the release is signed.

Why Choose Vahdat Weisman Law?

A life care plan works as the center of a catastrophic case, not an exhibit prepared at the end. That means getting the treating physicians’ future care recommendations into the record properly, retaining credentialed planners whose work survives a reliability challenge, pricing care where your family lives, and quantifying the no-fault funding gap before settlement discussions, not after.

From our Livonia office, we represent catastrophically injured people and their families throughout Michigan. Founding partners Kara E. Weisman and Jordan S. Vahdat have each been honored as Super Lawyers Rising Stars. Our attorneys are members of the State Bar of Michigan and active in the Michigan Association for Justice. We advance case costs, we work in English and Spanish, and we are available 24/7.

Frequently Asked Questions

• Who pays for the life care plan? We do. We advance case costs, including expert costs. No attorney fee unless we recover for you. Under MCR 8.121, the attorney fee and case disbursements are distinct, and the contingent fee is computed on the net amount recovered after case disbursements are deducted.
• Our no-fault insurer is already paying the bills. Why do we need a plan? Because of the fee schedule, your coverage limit, the family-care hour limitation, and the possibility that benefits are disputed or terminated. A life care plan quantifies the full cost of the care your family member actually needs, and that is the measure of the loss in the liability case.
• Will we get the money as a lump sum? Not necessarily for the future damages portion. Where future damages exceed $250,000 in gross present cash value, MCL 600.6307 requires the defendant or its insurer to satisfy that amount by purchasing an annuity. That is a feature of Michigan law, not a negotiating position.

About the Author

Jordan S. Vahdat is a founding partner of Vahdat Weisman Law in Livonia and handles negligence, premises liability, auto accident, and insurance dispute cases. He has been admitted in all Michigan state courts since 2014, practices in the Eastern District of Michigan, and has served as a case evaluator for the Washtenaw Circuit Trial Court and the 15th District Court since 2020. He is fluent in Spanish.

Talk to a Michigan Catastrophic Injury Lawyer

If you or a family member is facing a lifetime of care after a serious injury, call Vahdat Weisman Law at (734) 469-4994 or contact us online for a free consultation. Available 24/7, serving all of Michigan, with Spanish-speaking staff. Our spinal cord injury and paralysis, and traumatic brain injury pages cover related ground.

Dedicated to Justice. Devoted to You. Winning for Your Future.

Reviewed by Jordan S. Vahdat, Vahdat Weisman Law. Last reviewed September 2026.

This information is for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Every case is unique, and prior results do not guarantee future success.