South Florida’s Personal Injury Lawyers Drive Insurance Scams While Auto Premiums Soar

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel and other media outlets report that Sunshine State insurance regulators are attributing the recent skyrocketing of personal injury protection (PIP) premiums charged by top auto insurers there to “the large number of PIP lawsuits and resulting expenses….”  

As many of the ambulance-chasers driving this latest wave of phony-injury insurance scams submit bills for 26-hour days, meetings with the dead, or meetings that otherwise never took place, regulators say “the filing of [PIP] lawsuits is out of control.”  But now that the National Insurance Crime Bureau respectively ranks South Florida (Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties) and nearby Tampa Bay as the second worst and worst PIP-fraud regions nationwide, according to the Miami Herald, lawmakers in Tallahassee have acknowledged the growing problem and appear poised to take action.  

The latest Judicial Hellholes report heaped praise on Florida’s legislature for, among other things, enacting in 2010 a reform law that cracks down on Florida’s previously infamous slip-and-fall fraudsters.  Now it’s time for state lawmakers, on behalf of all honest insurance policyholders, to crack down on the state’s PIP racketeers.  Hellholes reporters will be watching.