Florida insurers said today they are waiting to see if Gov. Jeb Bush carries through on a threat to veto a bill revising the state's no-fault auto insurance system.
The Florida Legislature earlier this week passed a no-fault two-year extension bill that contains about $1 million in additional funding to fight personal injury protection fraud and changes what information must be contained in crash reports.
Sam Miller, executive vice president of the Florida Insurance Council, said Gov. Bush may be inclined to make good on his vow to veto the bill for lack of what he considered significant reform and include PIP in a special session that may happen next week.
The insurance industry was divided on the merits of extending Florida's no-fault law, with the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America (PCI) leading the effort to change the system rather than revert to adversary claims litigation as Colorado did earlier this year.
William Stander, Tallahassee, Fla.-based regional manager for PCI, said he was disappointed in the measure since it for the most part merely extended the law's sunset date by two years rather than enacting serious reforms.
He said his group had not yet decided on whether it would urge Gov. Bush to veto the bill, although he said there was a good chance the governor will in any event.
Mr. Stander said among the reforms sought was the adoption of a stronger verbal threshold and cost containment of medical expense benefits through a revised dispute resolution process as well as the adoption of fee schedules and treatment protocols that bring "consistency and certainty" to medical costs.
Mr. Miller said that other reforms that had been negotiated into the bill during weeks of committee hearings were stripped from the bill Monday.
At that point the bill's sponsor, Sen. Rudy Garcia, R-Hialeah, amended the bill to leave out most reforms, retaining only some of the anti-fraud language and a pushback of the sunset of Florida's no-fault auto insurance law to January 1, 2009.
Under the bill, accident reports must now contain information such as the date, time and location of the crash; a description of the vehicles involved; and the names and addresses of all drivers and passengers in the vehicles involved.
Additionally, the reports must contain the names and addresses of any witnesses and the name, badge number and law enforcement agency of the officer investigating the crash along with the names of the insurance companies for the respective parties involved in a crash.
To further combat fraud, the bill states that the absence of the information required on crash reports regarding the existence of passengers in the vehicles involved in the crash constitutes a rebuttable presumption that no such passengers were involved in the reported crash.
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