The new changes to the Michigan No Fault Act does not require you to buy medical coverage. You still have to buy insurance for your vehicle to legally drive it on the road, but the insurance companies have lobbied long and hard to reduce their exposure for medical bills resulting from car accidents.
Under the old law, every Michigan resident was required to have insurance on their car and also some amount of insurance for medical bills from an injury resulting from a car accident. Insurance companies didn’t like that because they would actually have to spend money on medical bills for their insureds. Along the way they started a new scam whereby they would ask their prospective clients if they had health insurance through work or some other entity. If they did, the insurance company would say that they could lower the premium by making health insurance primary and auto insurance secondary. What they would never do was check as to whether or not a person’s health insurance could actually be primary.
There are health insurance policies, typically through large corporations or that are offered under federal plans, that do not allow their health insurance to be primary for auto accidents. Of course, they would never tell the client to about that, and would simply sell them the insurance without knowing whether or not there would be coverage. What that did was open up a whole new area of litigation where the auto insurance and health insurance companies would point their fingers at each other. What that did was put people in the middle and require lawyers to get involved to figure out who was on the hook for medical bills. The only thing that controversy did was allow insurance companies to delay paying bills, which is what they love to do.
Don’t be fooled. Before buying automobile insurance make sure you know who is going to pay the bills if you are hurt in an auto accident. If you have any questions, call our office. We will be happy to walk you through the process.
Most importantly, do not opt out of pip coverage. A simple auto accident and one trip to the emergency room can cost $20,000.