No fault car insurance

Since Monday, people in Florida whose car insurance policies are up for renewal are going to be looking at a much cheaper bill this time around. While the Florida car insurance requirements were already pretty slim compared to most other states, requiring only property damage liability as well as personal injury protection, now that the no fault laws are no longer in place the personal injury protection will no longer be required, and so there is only one type of coverage that is actually required by Florida state car insurance law, a big difference from all of the other car insurance laws in other states that tend to stack on the coverage by the thousands.

Lawmakers had move slowly to renew the state’s no fault car insurance program for all of the reasons that I have stated previously, being that there was too much money being paid in car insurance and there were a lot of problems when it came to things such as fradulent claims with the help of the medical community and trial lawyers slipping through all of the loopholes for filing lawsuits based on the pain and suffering of the victim of the car insurance accident.

However, when the laws for no fault car insurance expired, the governor filed for a special session so that members of state’s legislature could devote a special time to looking at the state’s car insurance law and see what they could do and how they could get the compromise bill that they had brought up through and put into law. Not all of the lawmakers are in favor of the compromise, and so this could prove a problem for the people in Florida’s state legislature.

So what is going to happen if the lawmakers continue to put off and put of taking care of the problem of this type of coverage? Well, if they never address it then Florida will essentially have no auto insurance laws in state and it will become one of the other two states in the country who do not have any laws that regulate what kind of car insurance coverage a person who is driving needs to carry. The states that do not have any related laws are the state of Wisconsin and the state of New Hampshire. The special session would provide lawmakers with the time and the incentive to address an issue that they have already put off for over three years.

While residents of the state of Florida are still able to carry the personal injury protection coverage, many argue that taking the requirement away would inspire most residents to get rid of the coverage in order to save money. If they did this, then an undue burden would be placed on the hospitals in Florida, who at the moment recieve hundreds of millions of dollas every year from personal injury protection claims with car insurance companies. Almost half of the people under sixty five in the state of Florida do not carry any health insurance, so the hospitals would not be able to match these costs.

No fault Florida car insurance, pt. 5

• So how did this no fault Florida car insurance law come about in the first place, anyway?

Well, the no fault Florida car insurance law was started up in that state about forty years ago. For most of the time in the history of automobiles and high performance calls, compensation for car insurance accidents were covered by laws governing financial responsibility. Sometimes in the sixties, things changed, and most states switched over to mandatory car insurance laws. During the time between that initial start of having car insurance laws, and the switch to no fault Florida car insurance at the beginning of 1972, people were seeing some major faults in the current car insurance system.

The rates were going up like crazy in Florida and in other states as well. Most of this was because of injured people who would hire lawyers and take the other driver who was responsible for a car insurance accident to court. This ended up with lots of extra fees in lawsuits, lawyer costs, medical costs, and so on, so lawmakers figured that they had to do something to get everything under control. That is when no fault car insurance law came along. Massechusetts had already jump started things with its own no fault car insurance law, and Florida followed suit.

• A lot of trial lawyers are supporting the extension of the no fault Florida car insurance system. Why is that?

Trial lawyers have been rolling in the dough under the no fault Florida car insurance laws. The reason for this is that when there are pain and suffering lawsuits, they are often big ones, and it’s the car insurance company that pays the lawyer. With a single case, a car insurance lawyer can make over ten thousand dollars. Lawmakers hope to fix that by installing a fee system within the legislation, because at the moment the judge is the one who says how much a trial lawyer is going to get paid.

• Does Florida really have so many no fault car insurance law problems?

Oh, yeah. It has quite a few. Florida is number six on the national list of high auto insurance premiums. Even though there are supposed to be restrictions in place so that a lot of pain and suffering lawsuits don’t happen, there are also a lot of loopholes, so they go through the cracks anyway and trial lawyers are very good at finding out how. Pretty much all you need is a note from a health care professional saying that you have sustained a permanent injury, but the injury needn’t be all that bad. It could be a very slight, barely noticeable limp, but it would count.

Another thing is all the fraud. Car insurance companies pay more for medical costs than health insurance companies would if they were in the same position. There are accident set ups where people stage accidents and then go in for treatment of medical problems that don’t really exist so that doctors can get paid. This has caused an even worse rise in car insurance premium than before no fault car insurance laws were enacted.

No fault Florida car insurance, pt. 4

• So what exactly are our legislators planning on doing with this? What are they going to do to fix up the no fault Florida car insurance system, if anything at all?

Well, while the legislators say that their plans for fixing the no fault Florida car insurance system are good, the actual car insurance companies have spoken. The say that even with the changes the lawmakers in Florida intend to make to the current laws, there will still be the same old same old of extremely high car insurance rates and a whole lot of fraud in that state. The lawmakers seem to think differently, and they say that they will make the costs of medical care go down by installing a fee system into the legislation. They are also wanting to set to the side five thousand dollars of the amount that car crash victims get in the ER of the Florida hospitals to go to doctors in the emergency room. They think that this will somehow make doctors more likely to want to work in the emergency room. I guess we’ll see.

• What if I live in Florida, but I don’t really live in Florida?

So, are you a snowbird? If you’re living in Florida for less than three months out of the year, then the only car insurance laws you will have to obey will be the ones from your own state. However, if you’re in the state for any longer than that, then you are required by law to submit to Florida state car insurance laws, and that means a change in your plan if you have out of state insurance, even if you’re only going to be in Florida for less than half of the year. Florida is different from a bunch of states in that residents there don’t have to buy things such as bodily injury liability. What that means for you is that if you get into a car accident and the other person caused it, but you don’t have any kind of personal injury protection, then you’re out of luck because you can’t sue. Whenever you go to Florida, then, it’s probably a good idea to stock up on extra coverage like underinsured uninsured motorist coverage that will protect you from the sparely insured residents of the state of Florida.

• What other states have no fault car insurance systems?

That’s a very good question. Of the fifty states in the union, twelve of them have no fault car insurance laws and the other thirty eight of them have tort car insurance laws. Even a lot of the tort ones require things like medical benefits from everybody’s auto insurance companies, though. If you look at all of the different states that have no fault car insurance, then you will come up against some very different results. Some, like Colorado, are doing pretty good and not seeing a whole lot of fraud. Others, like New York, are coming up against billions of dollars of car insurance fraud and falling into the red zone.

No fault Florida car insurance, pt. 3

With the expiration of the no fault Florida car insurance law system, a lot of people are wondering what the changes will be. It will be a realtively smooth roll over for the moment, while legislators are trying to figure out whether or not the no fault Florida car insurance legislation should be renewed, or if an entirely new plan altogether should be come up with. While they’re waiting, Florida drivers with high performance cars ought to put some time into figuring out what is going on now with car insurance in their lovely state.

• So what’s the deal with medical bills? Who’s going to pay for them?

This is where the lack of no fault car insurance in Florida starts to seem a little disheartening. Right now, if you no longer have personal injury protection and you get into a car insurance accident in Florida and are injured, then you would get your coverage from your health insurance. Now, considering that health insurance has been free of this considerable burden for the past four decades, this could mean a sharp increase in health insurance rates for everybody. Okay, now what if you don’t have any health insurance? Well, that’s where reality kicks in with the new Florida car insurance system. Forty percent of the people who go to hospitals in Florida for car insurance accidents do not have health insurance coverage, and for those that don’t, the only kind of aid they could expect would be emergency health care. If they don’t have health insurance, then any non emergency needs would not be taken care of. The hospitals themselves will suffer too, because of all that revenue they got from car insurance companies for PIP. They’ll have losses to the tune of three hundred and fifty million dollars a year.

• Am I going to be paying less for car insurance if no fault Florida car insurance law never comes back?

Yes, and that’s one of the definite plus sides of this whole business. You will no longer be required to have personal injury protection with your auto insurance, so you will be able to cut your high performance car insurance coverage which will result in a smaller car insurance premium. The biggest car insurance company in the state of Florida, State Farm, says that they predict that the rates for people who cut personal injury protection out of their coverage will go down by about sixteen percent. No estimates have been made for those who will not take personal injury protection off of their coverage.

If you do not have health insurance, then it might be a good idea to get in touch with your car insurance company before your car insurance policy expires so that you can make sure that personal injury protection coverage will be left on. Normally, if a company is going to automatically take it off, then they will send you a letter stating so. If you don’t have health insurance, I would advise you to keep your PIP coverage, even if you are tempted by the lower prices of cutting your coverage.

No fault Florida car insurance, pt 2

• So, why did no fault Florida car insurance law expire?

Well, you can blame it on the oh so successful lawmakers in Florida’s legislature. See, a good four years back in September 2003, Florida lawmakers acknowledged that a lot of stuff in the Florida no fault car insurance system were messed up. The insurance premium rates were not low like they should have been, theoretically, and things needed to be changed and mistakes in the previous forty year old legislation fixed. In order to motivate themselves to do this, the Florida lawmakers put a deadline on fixing the Florida car insurance law. They set the last day of this law for the last day of September in 2007, and vowed to finish it up before then. However, they bumbled around as lawmakers do, and it didn’t get done. They tried to give themselves a little more time and extend the final day until the first day of 2009, but Governor Bush vetoed that extension. Now the law is expired, and it is up to them to figure out what they will do, if they will let it resort to what it was before or put a new system in place.

• So what happens to your car insurance policy now?

Well, right now the law for Florida no fault car insurance is in limbo, so it’s very iffy what will happen in the future. However, if sometime this month your car insurance policy is up for renewal, there won’t be a big change. All you will do is pay for car insurance coverage like usual, but this time you won’t have personal injury protection added onto it. If your car insurance policy does not come up for renewal until later, then you have nothing to worry about for right now. You will keep the same coverage as well as your personal injury protection coverage.

• What happens if we go back to no fault Florida car insurance, but I already have renewed my policy without personal injury protection?

Well, in this case the car insurance companies are required to add personal injury protection to your coverage right away. This may end up with you having to pay more than you thought, because you will be surcharged for the amount that the personal injury protection coverage would have cost if you had had it the entire time that the law was in a repealed status.

Not all of the auto insurance companies in the state will take your personal injury protection off automatically now that Florida no longer has a no fault car insurance law, although most of the bigger companies in the state will do so. If yours is not among these and you want it off, then all you have to is request for it to be removed. Also, the companies that do take it off automatically will send out a notice to all of the policy holders who will be affected one to two months before it is time for their policy to be renewed.

No fault Florida car insurance

I wrote a few weeks back that no fault Florida car insurance laws were set to expire on October first if the state legislature didn’t move to renew the laws. The sun set on the legislation, as they say, because the legislature did not renew on Monday, so now all of you high performance car owners in Florida are going to have to readjust to a new tort system in your state. This will probably mean hire prices, so getting discounts and shopping around for the best tort car insurance company for your high performance vehicle are more important now than ever.

At this moment, the lawmakers in Florida are trying to get the legislation back up. However, we can’t be sure that when it comes back it will be the same as it was before. Speculation runs high that it will be something similar that will come back when the legislation is resurrected, probably something based around the personal injury protection coverage, but no one’s sure what, and there are plenty of people who are fighting against bringing no fault Florida car insurance back at all.

Right now, the lawmakers in Florida have come up with some sort of plan for what the world after no fault Florida car insurance law will look like, although all of us outsiders don’t get to see it yet. Next week they’ll be meeting to work on cutting down the state budget, and it’s expected that during that time they will also look into the no fault law and probably add it to be revised, cut, changed, and possibly voted on while they’re doing what they have to do.

However, a lot of questions are going to come now that the death toll has been wrong for the forty year old no fault Florida car insurance legislation. A lot of the people in the state have been buying no fault car insurance coverage for their entire lives, and they don’t understand the tort car insurance system. Are their car insurance policies now void? Do they have to get new ones? How will this new type of car insurance even work?

First of all, an overview of what no fault car insurance is. No fault car insurance requires that policy holders purchase personal injury protection, which pays for their injuries and loss of wages in a car insurance. It removes the place of fault in the discussion of car insurance claims, because regardless of who was at fault, policy holders would make injury and wage loss claims with their own car insurance companies. In a no fault system, another thing that is limited is the lawsuits for pain and suffering. In order to be able to file one of these, you had to have been injured very bad.

All of these provsions were meant to make car insurance premiums lower. In many states, like Colorado, they have. However, it looks like that isn’t an across the board kind of thing, because in its forty year no fault car insurance law history, Florida hasn’t seen such great results.

Cheap California car insurance

If you live in the state of California and own a fast high performance muscle car, but have found that you are unable t afford any kind of auto insurance coverage, then you might be eligible for California’s Low Cost Automobile Insurance Program, which is operating in most areas of the state. There are several requirements for joining the cheap California car insurance program, which allows low income drivers to have the minimum California car insurance coverage for under three hundred dollars a year.

• You have to be a good driver.
• Make under a certain level of income every year.
• Live in one of the forty two counties that currently offer the program.

There have been some questions as to whether or not the Low Cost Autombile Insurance Program in California will cause a rise in taxes, even though it has been in state for almost ten years, starting in the year 1999. However, there is nothing for California constituents to worry about. The amount that they charge the people who join this program is enough to cover the car insurance premium that they need for their real risk level. The reason that these people might not be able to get a good car insurance policy otherwise is because of their credit or other factors not related to their driving ability that affect their car insurance premium.

This cheap California car insurance program is an effort to cause a decline in the amount of drivers in the state that are driving without insurance. Right now in California, three and a half of its drivers do not have any type of insurance. Every year about a hundred thousand letters go out when car insurance companies inform the department of motor vehicles that there has been a lapse in a driver’s coverage. If you have a car registered and insured, then car insuance companies are required to notify the DMV when there is a lapse and whenever you start up your policy again.

As a matter of fact, this cheap California car insurance program is not even funded by the tax payers. Instead, its funding comes from the car insurance companies themselves. The program is handled under the state assigned risk pool, which is also funded by the auto insurance companies. This way, people who don’t have the money for their car insurance and are good drivers are able to get car insurance and not cost the taxpayer anything.

The state insurance commissioner has expressed hope that the longer this program goes on, the fewer uninsured drivers there will be. However, there is no day when there will be zero uninsured drivers in the state of California. After all, the cheap California car insurance program does require that you are a good driver, and so the low income bad drivers are going to be left out, and there are many other reasons why someone might not be able to get car insurance coverage in that state. However, the cost of uninsured drivers does cause car insurance rates to rise, and since the program was instated and it took care of few hundred thousands of the uninsured drivers, car insurance rates in California have gone down.

Low cost auto insurance

I have a friend who lives in Los Angeles. She grew up in Houston where I did and we went to the same school, but she’s going to UCLA for college and has been living there for about three years. I remember when she called me to complain about how high everything was priced in California, and I was pretty surprised to hear some of the numbers she reeled off. California is certainly one of the states that has the highest cost of living, and the small apartment I pay for here would probably be about two square feet if I moved to Los Angeles. That’s one of the reasons that California’s state governement headed by the governator himself has made some great strides into setting up a low cost auto insurance program for Californians who are hurt by the high prices of auto insurance there.

It’s true that there are a lot of people on the road without car insurance, which is why having uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage is important. For some people, there really isn’t a choice. Many people have to choose between paying their car insurance and paying their rent, and, well–high performance cars are great and all, but who wants to live in one?

In recent times, California has started a program for lower income Californians called the Low Cost Automobile Insurance Program. This allowed these drivers to get car insurance coverage for less than four hundred bucks a year, around a dollar a day. While this low cost auto insurance did not give such extra coverage categories such as comprehensive and collision coverage, it is a lot more generous in its coverage amounts than are other types of car insurance coverage programs for low income residents in other states. Californians had a lot more to gain than most.

Before, this program was only in effect in twenty of California’s counties. However, yesterday there was an expansion and twenty two more counties are added, so now a total of forty two counties offer this low cost auto insurance program to their residents. That doesn’t mean all of the state is covered. California has a total of fifty eight counties, so there are twelve that are left out. Most of these are in the rural mountainous areas of the state. The prices in these areas aren’t as high, so it’s not so bad, but all the same the state’s commissioner of insurance says that he expects that the low cost auto insurance program will be available to the residents of those counties as well before the end of the 2007 fiscal year.

The cost for most participants in this program is only $262 dollars a year, which you would have to be very very preferred and discounted to get off the program. This is a big help to a lot of lower income residents who have credit problems which have caused huge raises in their car insurance premiums since the new use of credit reports began years ago. If you are in California and find yourself in one of these counties and unable to pay for insurance for your high performance car even after taking all of my advice, then by all means, jump on!

Discount car insurance, pt. 4

And now I am finally reaching the bottom of my list of discount car insurance deals. I want to state, and I’m not sure if I’ve said this before, that by combining things like high deductible and safety features with other discount car insurance deals, I have manage to get my monthly car insurance premium down to sixty dollars a month, from a beginning price of a hundred and sixty dollars a month. This is huge for me, and it should be for you too because it tells you that anybody can have cheap auto insurance, even someone like me who has had to file proof of insurance and paid the DMV to keep my license.

• New business.

I really like this one, because it’s a great way for struggling small business owners to minimize costs while they are taking one of the biggest financial jumps in their lives. I was working for a new company earlier this year, a restaurant, and I mentioned to my boss that a lot of car insurance companies gave discount car insurance rates to people who have just started a new business. I suppose it is because business owners tend to be more responsible and pay more attention on the road, although no studies have been published or releases made. Whatever the case, my boss was all over it the second I told him.

• Sticking to it.

If you stay with a certain company for a long time, then most will give you a lower discount car insurance rate for being a loyal customer. These discounts vary from company to company, but they can often be pretty hefty. I’m just rubbing my hands together for when I will qualify for this discounts–probably never, because I’m not starting to get tired of the car insurance company I’m with, but who knows?

• Growing up.

While there are a lot of discount car insurance deals for young people, the picking gets pretty sweet when you hit fifty five. People between the ages of fifty five and sixty five have the lowest instance of car insurance accidents, and so these policy holders always get the best car insurance prices. You would have to drunk drive yourself into the side of a barn to get a high price at this age.

• Constant vigilance.

You can also get a discount car insurance rate in most car insurance companies if you put an active anti theft device on your car. There are even a bunch of states that require car insurance companies to give you a discount in this instance. Even after the discounts, there are things that you can do, measures you can take, to prevent your car from being stolen or broken into and having to file a comprehensive car insurance claim. You can always lock your doors, just common sense types of things. Also, remember that it is better to park your car in spaces that are well lit and heavily occupied. A vehicle is more likely to be stolen on a dark, empty street than right in front of Wal Mart in the afternoon.

Discount car insurance, pt. 3

And the list of discount car insurance deals goes on. Another tip that I want to offer to anyone who is getting a discount car insurance deal is to make sure that they keep track of their own car insurance premium. See how much you are quoted for your premium before the discounts, and then make the calculations yourself for how much your premium will be after the discounts have been added in. I say this because you cannot always trust the car insurance company to do things right. When I first got my good student discount, it was supposed to be for fifteen percent. However, after a couple of months of paying for my premium, I realized that they only had discounted me ten percent! I called them up and fixed it, but I didn’t get my money back for that extra five percent each month. Needless to say, I don’t do business with them anymore, but you should always be careful.

For those who are students like me, I want to present a way for them to save on their car insurance premiums while trying to survive on their part time incomes and get a start on those student loans. Lucky for us, car insurance companies are willing to offer students some big breaks, even while charging us a lot for our age. I suppose it is an acceptable compromise. Here are some of the best student discount car insurance deals.

• Leave your car at home.

Even if you want to show off your high performance car to all of the people at college, there is a time and a place for everything, and unless you want to be paying full price to afford to insure that car, then college is not the place. If you are going to school over a hundred miles away from home, then it actually saves you a lot of money to stay on your parent’s car insurance policy and to leave your car at home. But what’s the point of that?! you might ask. Well, while you’re at school you can always hitch rides with other people or walk or take the bus, while whenever you come home for summer, holidays, and weekends your car is waiting for you. Being insured while in school is expensive, and a lot of college students can’t do it at all.

• Make good grades.

Instead of partying all night, maybe you should concentrate a little more often on your textbooks. Almost every car insurance company I have spoken with offers a good student discount for young people who average Bs on all of their reports or a three point five grade point average.

• Take a defensive driving course.

You might have just finished taking your very first driving course a couple years back and think that you don’t need a defnesnive driving course, but who cares about need? A lot of states actually require car insurance companies to give you a discount if you take a defensive driving course, and even in the ones that don’t a lot of companies still offer it. Even if you sleep in the class, do it for the discount. But it you stay awake, you’ll learn a lot.

Cheers,

Fashun Guadarrama.

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