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Sumber : Lobakmerah
Personal Injury Lawyer West Palm Beach
Florida’s top 25 car insurers raised Personal Injury Protection premiums up to 54 percent since the start of 2017, records requested by The Palm Beach Post show, even as industry lobbyists advised lawmakers to put off PIP repeal another year and cast doubt on a state-ordered report that said drivers could save $81 per car by killing it.
Buckle up again for financially hazardous conditions in Florida, where 16 million drivers already pay car insurance bills among the six highest in the nation. That’s more than $1,250 a year on average. And they’re going up again.
At the heart of this drama is a kind of insurance that Florida requires drivers to buy, PIP. Florida is one of a dwindling handful of states with a no-fault system. PIP is designed to provide $10,000 of coverage for a driver’s own injuries, regardless of who is at fault in an accident.
The system lives on over the protests of exasperated drivers who say they already have Medicare, employer health plans or other coverage for their medical bills. Why should the government force them to buy PIP? It strikes many like paying Cadillac prices for a $10,000 slice of fraud-prone coverage they don’t need in the first place.
“PIP is worthless,” driver Leo Solar of West Palm Beach said. “It’s just like throwing your money away.”
If Florida had some of the nation’s lowest car insurance rates, and PIP was helping bring that about, that might be one thing.
But PIP costs to consumers are shooting up 35 percent faster than overall premiums since January 2017, according to data The Post requested from the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation.
Hoping for rate relief? Not everyone in Tallahassee seems to be in a big rush. A House plan that passed 88-15 to repeal PIP will die in less than a month unless the Senate acts. Similar legislation expired in the Senate a year ago.
The office of Senate president Joe Negron, R-Stuart, did not respond to a request for comment.
With billions of dollars at stake in the nation’s third largest car insurance market, lobbying interests from lawyers to doctors and insurers are fighting to get a hand on the steering wheel or a foot on the the brake.
So Florida’s system sputters on. Its $10,000 benefit has not kept up with medical inflation, changing little since the 1970s. An overhaul supported by Gov. Rick Scott and billed as protecting consumers in 2012 even reduced some benefits, such as capping non-emergency care at $2,500.
But the rate hikes keep coming.
The six-month PIP premium Solar paid last November was $249.30. That was up from $230.74 in the spring of 2016. It has climbed more than 40 percent from the $175.46 he paid in November of 2015.
Even drivers who never get in accidents have to pay for PIP’s rising costs in their region. PIP often accounts for up to a quarter or more of a driver’s total bill.
Since the start of 2017, overall premiums have gone up 9.9 percent among the top 25 insurers, but the parts of the insurance bill that are rising fastest are PIP (13.4 percent) and uninsured motorist coverage (14 percent). Drivers may choose to buy uninsured motorist coverage not necessarily because other drivers have no insurance at all, but because Florida lets them carry only state-required minimum coverage including PIP. That means their insurance provides little help to others who may suffer harm they cause.
A bill the House passed, HB 19, would repeal PIP and require $25,000 of bodily-injury liability coverage per person or $50,000 per accident. That’s comparable to what most states require. It won’t mean a drastic change for most Florida drivers, because more than 90 percent already carry some level of BI coverage, according to state regulators.
