All the TV commercials and the aggressive marketing with regard to the auto insurance bills are not going to go down well with the Floridians. The residents of Florida are expected to pay around $1,200 per year on auto insurance and this is the much higher than what most people pay everywhere else in the Southeast.
The lawmakers in Florida will have to find ways and means to cut down on the excessive attorney’s fees as well as the scams that are associated with the PIP auto insurance cover. This will help bring down the high auto insurance premiums that are imposed on the residents of Florida.
Though the PIP insurance cover is a pretty decent idea it does not seem to be working well in Florida. In most states, there are ways to determine who caused the crash when there are two cars involved in the accident. The insurers, motorists, as well as the courts help determine this fact and the party at fault will have to pay damages to the injured person.
However, in the state of Florida as well as 8 other states the drivers will have to carry insurance cover of around $10,000 where they can claim for a portion of the medical costs from their own insurers, regardless of who is at fault.
In general, any injured resident of Florida cannot sue the other motorist unless there is a huge medical bill or enough evidence of gross negligence. So theoretically speaking, the PIP cover does have certain advantages where the injured drivers can get some medical costs covered even when the other driver is uninsured. Since there are lesser court fees the insurers can afford to pay more by way of benefits.
However, the PIP in Florida hasn’t succeeded in keeping the legal expenses down. This is due to the multiplier that is given to the lawyers who win the PIP cases, where the attorney gets paid 250% of the ordinary fees. This reward had originally been created to win civil rights cases and not regular disputes between customers and insurers.
The next big reason for the high insurance rates is due to the auto insurance fraud that is the highest in Florida. Although the traffic safety has increased overall, with lesser number of fatal accidents, the number of claims under the PIP cover seems to have increased to 46.2% between mid-2008 and 2010. Out of these there were around 1,500 fraudulent claims.
