subject: High Rates for Personal Injury Claims [print this page] High Rates for Personal Injury Claims
It was an insurance research group that reported that there was a decline in auto accident rates but an increase in personal injury claims because of the increasing involvement of lawyers. When it comes to the executive director of this non-profit group, he said that although real improvements in car safety and a reduction in actual auto accidents are being realized, the safety dividend remains doubtful because of how the changes in claim behavior consume the savings. From him came the release of a study showing that the number of personal injury claims has increased dramatically in the states of Louisiana, California, South Carolina, Arizona, and in certain urban areas most notably in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia.
They review a number of claim files and from the states and cities with high injury claim frequencies come the most number of serious injuries. People report neck and back sprains as much as possible and a lot of them have attorneys and this is why such cases account for nearly half of all the auto insurance dollars paid for highway injuries. As there is no rational explanation possible when it comes to the question of whether or not the nature of the injuries which are the easiest to build up indicates an increase in exaggerated or fake claims, he says that this is a possible conclusion.
What he said was that people in California are not impervious or that they're making claims people don't make in other places in this case. Going up at least 30 percent nationwide since 1980, there has been an increase in the ratio of injury claims to property damage claims based on the Trends in Auto Bodily Injury Claims study. More lawyers can be found in California than in any other state and they have more than any country outside the United States and the highest injury against property damage claim ratio can be found here.
Coming in second is Arizona and then there is Louisiana and South Carolina. From 1985 to 1987, it was Philadelphia which had the highest ratio with an average of 75 injury claims awarded per 100 property damage accidents. Los Angeles at 60.6 came in second and coming in third was Chicago with a 52.1.
Areas with rising personal injury claims can easily be associated to those areas which have consumer activism and moves to limit insurance rates. People are working to legislate auto insurance limits in all California, Arizona, Louisiana, and South Carolina. The reasons behind the inflation of their insurance rates are these excessive claims.
Claims can be built up by the lawyers by sending clients to doctors and chiropractors. People may not start out, intentionally, to fake a claim, but when they go to a lawyer; the lawyer tries to build up a claim. What a lawyer will do is tell them to see doctors and chiropractors to see if they are OK. It is to build up the medical record that the lawyer does this.
Compared to those where a lawyer is not involved, medical expenses for claims average about $5,000 higher when there is a lawyer. For every $1 in actual medical expenses, on average, the claimant will get an additional $2 in pain and suffering, and lawyers want to build up that claim. Based from an earlier study by the Insurance Research Council, the number of cases which involved lawyers have increased 42 percent. Noting a 1977 Supreme Court decision, this barred restrictions on advertising by lawyers causing the proliferation of lawyer involvement in personal injury cases.
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