About five months before the start of Florida’s 2012 legislative session, efforts are already underway to promote policies that could fight personal injury protection insurance fraud.
Only a few provisions in bills proposed this year cleared the state Legislature. At a Cabinet meeting Tuesday, Insurance Commissioner Kevin McCarty, Gov. Rick Scott and Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater expressed support for new PIP legislation.
Atwater said the state should “stop throwing consumers to the wolves” and Scott urged McCarty to meet with legislative leaders to “have something happen this session.”
Robin Westcott, the state's new insurance consumer advocate, announced recently that she plans to develop PIP legislative proposals by December. She'll issue recommendations after meeting with a working group of legislators and others.
Personal injury protection, or PIP, pays medical bills for policyholders injured in auto accidents, regardless of which driver is at fault. It's intended to protect Floridians who don't have health insurance and to avoid lawsuits and their costs for minor injuries. Florida drivers are required to carry $10,000 worth of coverage.
The proposed legislation this year would have, among other things, made it more difficult for people to file claims and for lawyers to collect huge fees. A broad coalition including insurers supported most of the proposed changes. But legal and healthcare industry representatives pushed only for those changes that they felt wouldn't hurt people with legitimate claims.
McCarty provided information from a report his office did to support the need for legislation. He said:
PIP claims payouts increased more than 50 percent from under $1.5 billion in 2006 to about $2.3 billion in 2010 even as the number of licensed drivers has increased only slightly and the number of crashes have dropped.
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