Okay, this is not really a truck accident headline but I just had to voice my opinion about the news coming out of Florida this morning. It seems that there is an ever growing problem of injury protection fraud taking place in Florida, and it’s costing the state billions of dollars annually. First Coast News article describes how police is crashing vehicles in a demonstration to show how some types of fraud occur. There is no doubt in my mind that personal injury fraud occurs all the time, after all who wouldn’t want a nice settlement for a few minutes worth of work. However, what bugs me is the proposed solution to combat this growing number of PIP (personal injury protection) claims and the stance which Gov. Rick Scott takes on lawyer fees and intent.
“We’ve got to do the right thing so these lawyers can’t say, if an insurance company might underpay by a dollar, so I’ll file this suit and get significant legal fees just to get legal fees. Not because they’re helping citizens of this state.’ So the House bill does a better job at this.”
Really Governor? You really think the lawyers are behind the increase in PIP claims? Maybe on their way to work they walk by a homeless guy and wisper ‘Hey dummy, stop sitting around and run into that car over there and I’ll help you file a personal injury claim’ ? Or perhaps at their kid’s basketball game they walk around recruiting single parents to try something ‘new and daring’ to make a ‘quick buck’. Honesty, who could come up with a statement like that?
A Florida House bill proposes that all PI victims go to the ER whether they require it or not. The article brings 2 very good points: one being that the injured cannot choose to go to their own doctors and second pointing out that the ERs are already overcrowded as is. It must be really awesome living in Florida where there is room for everyone at the ER despite overcrowding. In California one can expect to wait 8 hours for a severed finger, as claimed by a Yelp reviewer. Pardon my sarcasm but someone has to say something about this proposed bill.
Perhaps I’m overstating my points, after all there are people who hide behind cars and leap out to purposefully injury themselves in order to defraud insurance companies through PI claim. Seriously? People are leaping in front of incoming traffic to injury themselves? Holy cow! The claims are up, the lawyer fees are high and the only way we can think of solving this is by penalizing legitimately injured people by making them wait extra so that the leaping fool can get himself expected first? I propose a new idea: let’s not consider any of that craziness coming from the Florida House and take a moment to think about how we can eliminate this problem of PI fraud. There has to be an alternative solution to this unquestionable problem.