The Issue with Personal Injury Claims

As reported by an insurance research group, auto accident rates may have declined but personal injury claims went through the roof thanks to the increasing involvement of lawyers. Here, they're not getting the safety dividend because the changes in claim behavior are gobbling up the savings even if they are seeing real improvements in car safety and a reduction in actual auto accidents as said by the executive director of this non-profit group. He ended up releasing a study showing that the number of personal injury claims has increased dramatically in the states of California, Arizona, Louisiana, South Carolina, and in certain urban areas most notably in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

Considering the claim files that they process, the most number of serious injuries can be found in states and cities with high injury claim frequencies. The reason why such cases account for nearly half of all the auto insurance dollars paid for highway injuries is because more people have attorneys and most of them report neck and back sprains. When it comes to the question of whether or not the nature of the injuries which are the easiest to fake indicates an increase in exaggerated or fake claims, this is a possible conclusion according to him as there is no rational explanation for this.

He said that he wants to conclude that people in California have more tender necks or that they're making claims people don't make in other places. 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. California does not only have more lawyers than any other state but they have more than any country outside the United States and they have the highest injury against property damage claim ratio.

Coming in second is Arizona and then there is Louisiana and South Carolina. During the period from 1985 to 1987, the one which had the highest ratio with an average of 75 injury claims awarded per 100 property damage accidents was Philadelphia. It was Los Angeles that ranked in second at 60.6 and with a 52.1 was Chicago in third.

As you can see, you can associate areas which have consumer activism and moves to limit insurance rates to those which realize increasing personal injury claims. In terms of auto insurance limits in all California, South Carolina, Arizona, and Louisiana, there are moves for their legislation. There is an inflation of their insurance rates due to these excessive claims.

As clients are sent to doctors and chiropractors, the lawyers can easily build up claims. 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. Here, the lawyer will send them to doctors and chiropractors to check if they are OK. What the lawyer wants is to build up the medical record.

Compared to those where a lawyer is not involved, medical expenses for claims average about $5,000 higher when there is a lawyer. Claims are built up by lawyers considering how the claimant can receive another $2 in pain and suffering for every $1 in actual medical expenses. And, he noted, an earlier study by the Insurance Research Council showed the number of cases in which lawyers are involved increased 42 per cent. Causing the proliferation of lawyer involvement in personal injury cases, he suggested a 1977 Supreme Court decision that barred restrictions on advertising by lawyers.

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