Concocted or exaggerated claims for whiplash injury are a pain in the neck – and the wallet – for sincere motorists.
It is we who end up paying the price of ill-gotten compensation payments and needless medical bills via larger automobile insurance coverage premiums.
The insurance sector reckons whiplash fees a standard motorist £90 a year on their premium. Around £60 of that is believed to be unjustified.
A whacking wonderful £2 billion a year, all told.
Go figure
Some apologists for the present situation – mostly legal pros who say they have the interests of motorists at heart – say insurers are crying wolf more than whiplash to enhance their profitability.
But ponder this. There had been 190,000-odd road accidents in 2006, and 150,000 in 2012 – a welcome fall of about of 22%.
In the identical period, the quantity of individual injury claims filed subsequent to a road accident increased from 520,000 to more than 800,000 – a 60% improve.
Vehicles are also obtaining safer – they’re built to shield the occupants in the occasion of a collision. So clearly, one thing dodgy is going on.
In a recent survey by insurance firm Axa, one particular in 10 men and women admitted they had lodged a false claim, or knew a person who had tried to scam their insurer over whiplash.
Tricky diagnosis
It’s not particularly hard, either. Whiplash is notoriously difficult to diagnose due to the fact there are no visible symptoms.
It’s essentially injury to the soft tissue, so you might not suffer cuts or bruises. In other words, if you complain of neck ache, your medical professional have to either sign you off with whiplash or get in touch with you a liar.
No wonder 73% of folks agree that whiplash claims are less difficult to embellish than any other type of insurance coverage claim.
Government action
The government is keen to tackle the difficulty and has not too long ago introduced a series of measures in an try to curb our compensation culture.
For example, it has imposed a ban on referral costs in individual injury claims, so information of accidents cannot be sold onto lawyers.
It also desires future whiplash claims to be substantiated by accredited medical experts, with no industrial tie in between authorities and lawyers.
Lawyers won’t be able to provide inducements (such as a laptop) to encourage folks to claim, and these who generate medical reports can no longer provide treatment.
Insurers and lawyers will be encouraged to share details in a bid to bring a serial fraudster’s previous mis-deeds to light. And the entire caboodle will be scrutinised by an insurance claims fraud taskforce under David Hertzell, a massive cheese from the Law Commission.
Definition of whiplash
But Axa is calling for additional reforms – and it seems to have public backing.
Most folks, for example, consider you must only be able to claim if your neck ache is serious, which appears entirely reasonable.
Axa for that reason proposes a clear definition of whiplash in accordance with anything named the Quebec Task Force Classification, which grades injuries in growing order of severity from 1 to 4.
Virtually 93% of whiplash claims in the UK would be classed as grades 1 and 2, so Axa suggests that compensation must only apply to grade 3 and 4 injuries. The claims bill would consequently plummet.
Healthcare assessment
A lot of men and women also believe that medical assessment of whiplash ought to be much more rigorous.
Axa is strongly in favour of independent examiners in line with the government proposals for a panel of authorized and disinterested specialists.
Time limit
The government seems much less keen to introduce a time limit for whiplash claims, even though limits operate in other nations such as Sweden – and seem to have widespread support.
The current system in the UK gives people up to 3 years to make a whiplash claim, which a lot of argue is as well lengthy and wide open to abuse.
It’s possibly no surprise that nearly 3 quarters of the respondents in the Axa survey consider the time limit must be reduce to a single year, although 43% judge one month to be extended sufficient to sort out the paperwork.
Aviva, one more insurer, also suggests compensating minor whiplash with rehabilitation rather than money to deter fraudsters.
Hard to remedy
All of which is fine and dandy, of course. Anything which confronts the scourge of fraud and assists minimize premiums for sincere policyholders has to be embraced.
But I’m far from optimistic. This sort of crime is akin to these fairground games exactly where plastic frogs pop their heads out of holes in a table top and you have to bash them back in once again with a hammer.
Staunch the flow of ripped-off funds to low-life fraudsters from one particular certain source, and you can bet subsequent year’s automobile insurance premium that they’ll create a fresh provide in double-fast time.
Fraud of this nature will only be curtailed if and when insurers cease to seen by a hefty chunk of the populace as ‘fair game’ – that is component of the brief to the Hertzell taskforce.
We can only keep our fingers crossed.
Crackdown continues on whiplash larceny
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