Spinal Cord Injury Claims in Houston, TX Future Care and Impairment Evidence

Trauma designation and the first records

The Texas Department of State Health Services designated trauma facility list identifies 302 designated facilities statewide with 20 at Level I. Houston's Level I facilities on that list sit at 77030 in Trauma Service Area Q: Harris Health System Ben Taub Hospital, Memorial Hermann - Texas Medical Center, and Texas Children's Hospital, with Harris Health System Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital designated at Level III in the same service area. For a suspected spinal injury the trauma admission generates imaging, neurological examinations, operative reports where surgery follows, and rehabilitation planning. Those documents are the objective baseline, and they should be requested in full rather than accepted as a discharge summary.

Economic and noneconomic damages are defined separately

Civil Practice and Remedies Code §41.001(8) defines compensatory damages as economic and noneconomic damages, §41.001(4) defines economic damages as compensatory damages intended to compensate a claimant for actual economic or pecuniary loss, and §41.001(9) defines future damages as damages incurred after the date of the judgment. Section 41.001(12) defines noneconomic damages to include physical pain and suffering, mental or emotional pain or anguish, loss of consortium, disfigurement, physical impairment, loss of companionship and society, inconvenience, and loss of enjoyment of life. Physical impairment is a distinct listed item, which is why functional documentation, showing what a person can and cannot do, is not interchangeable with a pain description.

The paid-or-incurred limit on medical expense

Section 41.0105 limits recovery of medical or health care expenses incurred to the amount actually paid or incurred by or on behalf of the claimant. With a spinal injury the billing file can involve trauma admission, surgery, implanted hardware, inpatient rehabilitation, durable equipment, home modification, and ongoing therapy, billed through several entities with different payment arrangements. The practical consequence is that a rider or family should collect the complete billing and payment record from each provider rather than a single balance figure. Property Code §55.008(a) requires a hospital, on written request, to make records available for examination and copying as promptly as possible, and forbids denying access because a record is incomplete.

The lien question on a long admission

Property Code §55.004(b) limits a hospital lien to the lesser of the hospital's charges for services provided during the first 100 days of hospitalization, 50 percent of all amounts recovered through a cause of action, judgment, or settlement, or a trier-of-fact amount for hospital services less the pro rata share of reasonable attorney's fees and expenses. On a long admission the first-100-days figure and the 50 percent figure can be far apart, and which one controls is a legal question. Section 55.005(a) requires the hospital to file written notice with the county clerk of the county where services were provided before money is paid, and §55.007(a) makes a release invalid unless lien charges are addressed as the statute specifies.

Coverage limits are the constraint nobody mentions early

Transportation Code §601.072 fixes minimum motor-vehicle liability coverage at $25,000 for property damage, $30,000 where one accident causes bodily injury to or the death of a single person, and $60,000 where the same accident injures or kills more than one. A catastrophic injury can exceed those minimums immediately, which is why other potentially available coverage, including uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage under Insurance Code §1952.101, becomes a document-reading exercise. Section 1952.106 provides that underinsured coverage pays the amounts the insured is legally entitled to recover, not exceeding the policy limit, reduced by the amount recovered or recoverable from the insurer of the underinsured vehicle.

Local context, and where advice belongs

TxDOT's 2024 county table recorded 2,282 suspected serious injury crashes in Harris County and 257 in Fort Bend County, from reports processed as of April 9, 2025, counting all road users. Bellaire accounts for 13 of the 906 half-mile segments on the City of Houston High Injury Network mapped from 2014 through 2018 data. Civil Practice and Remedies Code §16.003(a) generally allows two years from accrual for a personal-injury suit. This page is general information about published Texas statutes and crash data, not legal advice and not a prognosis. A family facing this situation should take the records to the attorney advertising on this site or another attorney of their choosing.