§ 5031.Basis for determining judgment to be entered.

Article 50-A departs from the ordinary rule that a money judgment gets paid all at once. CPLR 5031 is the engine of that departure, laying out step by step how a court turns a jury's verdict in a medical, dental, or podiatric malpractice case, including a wrongful death claim rooted in such malpractice, into a judgment that pays out over time. The court starts by applying any applicable additur or remittitur adjustments to the verdict, then works through a sequence of statutory steps rather than entering judgment on the jury's raw numbers.

Some categories of damages stay simple: past damages, future loss of services, future loss of consortium, wrongful death damages, and future pain-and-suffering awards of five hundred thousand dollars or less all get paid in a lump sum. If every category in a case falls into lump-sum territory, the judgment is just entered on the total, and the rest of the article's machinery never engages. The complexity kicks in once future pain-and-suffering damages exceed five hundred thousand dollars, or once future economic and pecuniary damages are involved. For pain and suffering above that threshold, the greater of thirty-five percent or five hundred thousand dollars comes out as a lump sum, and the remainder is paid as a stream over the period the jury set or eight years, whichever is shorter, growing four percent annually. Future economic damages follow a related but distinct path: the court builds a stream of payments from the growth rate, current-dollar amount, and period of years the jury found for each item, then takes thirty-five percent of the present value of that stream as a lump sum and streams the rest.

Discounting those streams to present value uses a statutory formula rather than expert opinion: the ten-year Treasury Bond rate as of the verdict date for streams of twenty years or less, and a blended rate, averaging that same Treasury rate for the first twenty years with a rate two points higher for years beyond that, for longer streams. After the streams are built, the statute layers in a fixed sequence of deductions, comparative negligence and settlement set-offs first, then the plaintiff's attorney's litigation expenses, then attorney's fees, then any liens not separately awarded, each one taken proportionately from every remaining item of damages and paid as a lump sum, with the remaining streams recalculated after each step.

What survives that sequence has to be backed by real security. The defendants and their insurers must offer and guarantee an annuity contract funding the remaining stream, running from the verdict date for the jury's chosen period, or the plaintiff's life, whichever is shorter, with two carve-outs: a lost-earnings award runs for its full determined term regardless, and an award the jury found permanent continues for the plaintiff's entire life, growing at the same rate the jury set. The final judgment, entered under subdivision (h), reflects the lump sums plus the present value of whatever streams remain after all of this.