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Insurance > Car Insurance
Study finds no-fault insurance a prescription for treating whiplash
JEFF DONN, Associated Press Writer. Associated Press.
Copyright Associated Press
Got a case of whiplash? Some researchers say the best cure for reducing the pain from minor traffic accidents might be found in an unlikely place: No-fault insurance.
Researchers at the University of Alberta in Canada discovered that people hurt in traffic accidents actually recover better when they can't collect money for their pain and suffering.
Their study, which analyzed whiplash claims when the Canadian province of Saskatchewan switched to a no-fault system, appears in today's editions of The New England Journal of Medicine.
A total of 13 U.S. states have adopted no-fault auto insurance laws, which generally let policy holders recover benefits regardless of fault and restrict the right to sue. Massachusetts was the first to adopt such a system in 1971.
The Alberta researchers studied 7,462 whiplash claims for six months before and one year after Saskatchewan dropped its pain and suffering awards. Under no fault, people could instead collect more money for medical costs and lost wages.
The frequency of claims under no fault slipped 28 percent within six months, and the average time to settle claims plunged 54 percent, the researchers reported.
They asked people with claims to fill out follow-up health questionnaires. They found that, as people settled claims, they reported less neck pain, better functioning, and fewer other symptoms.
"When benefits are tied to the amount of pain you have, then you tend to focus more on your pain _ and you feel more pain," said J. David Cassidy, an epidemiologist who was lead author of the study. He said no-fault takes away that financial incentive to delay recovery.
Dr. Richard Deyo, who does cost-benefit analyses at the University of Washington, said there may be several reasons that people report fewer symptoms under no fault.
He said some people fraudulently exaggerate whiplash when they can win pain and suffering awards. Conversely, under no-fault, some may feel _ consciously or not _ that it's not worth fussing about pain with no financial return, and they suffer in silence.
But Deyo, who wrote a journal editorial on the study, said many people also seem to feel better. "It seems axiomatic that if you have to prove you are ill, you can't get well," he said.
Officials in the U.S. insurance industry said the study builds on other research with similar findings.
Loretta Worters, a spokeswoman for the Insurance Information Institute, said a 4.5 percent drop in U.S. auto premiums last year is credited partly to no-fault insurance.
Since tension can aggravate neck pain, some people may actually feel better with a quicker and easier claims process that is "eliminating some of the stress of not knowing if the claim is settled," she suggested.
Peter Kinzler, president of the Coalition of Auto-Insurance Reform, in Alexandria, Va., said fault systems also greatly inflate both outright fraud or conscious exaggeration of medical claims to levels as high as 40 percent.
"For small claims, everybody has the incentive to overutilize the system: doctors, lawyers, claimants," he said.
On the Net: New England Journal of Medicine: http://www.nejm.org Coalition Against Insurance Fraud: http://www.insurancefraud.org
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
Dateline: Undated
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