Michael Moline
The House version of legislation to do away with personal injury protection, or PIP, insurance in Florida will get a hearing Monday before the Insurance & Banking Subcommittee.
PCS/HB 1063 is 57 pages long, but here’s the thrust:
Effective Jan. 1, motorists no longer would be required to maintain PIP coverage. Instead, they would insure against bodily injury or death caused by accidents.
Similar legislation is pending in the Senate. That’s SB 1766 by Tom Lee. Also pending is SB 156 by Jeff Brandes. Neither has yet secured a hearing in committee.
Neither version would make it more difficult to collect attorney fees, which business and insurance interests believe are driving up premiums, one insurance lobbyist complained.
“If you’re not going to address the attorney fees, to what end?” the lobbyist said.
Committee chairman Danny Burgess, a Zephyr Hills Republican, has been painstakingly bringing together the competing interests on volatile legislation this year — including workers’ compensation and AOB reform — for marathon workshops, searching for consensus.
On PIP, too, the interests are deeply divided, said Richard Stark, the ranking Democrat on the committee.
“Lawyers want broader definition than insurers on bad faith. Some groups want no repeal. Hospitals want more med(ical) pay. Getting all stakeholders together on this is going to be difficult,” Stark said in an email.
For his part, Stark, an insurance agent, said: “I am not 100 percent convinced that discarding PIP is the best solution.”
Here’s how the new system would work. Individuals would have to prove they have bodily injury coverage worth $20,000 per person and $50,000 per incident, and $10,000 against property damage, when they register your car. The requirements for businesses would be higher.
There would be a transition period for policies already in effect.
The change is intended to save money — a study conducted for the Office of Insurance Regulation suggested in September that repeal could save $81 per car, although motorists could wind up paying more for other types of coverage, including health insurance.
The insurance lobbyist argued that PIP coverage represents only about one-quarter of total premiums. Bodily injury comprises half. And the bill would do nothing about mounting expenses for property damage — driven largely by texting-while-driving.
“That’s the overall trend. It’s a general understanding in the industry,” the lobbyist said.
