You’re stopped behind a vehicle at a stoplight on your motorcycle. Your left foot is on the floorboard, your right foot is on the pavement. A fast-approaching car from behind you has a driver searching for a charging cord and they never look up. The impact launches you from your seat. Your helmet is thrown backwards and you feel intense pressure on your neck. Your left knee smashes into the handle bars and your femur snaps. Your right leg smashes into the handle bars and your right femur shatters, twisting you to your right. Your pelvis cracks as you’re thrown toward the ground. You slam into your windshield, breaking three ribs and bruising the rest. You instinctively put out your right arm to brace for impact and it buckles upon impact, breaking your shoulder in three places. Your helmet hits the pavement. Your chin is driven into your chest and everything goes bright white and silent.

You wake 10 days later covered in casts. A bar runs from leg to leg for stability and it makes it easier to turn you over. Your neck has been fused and your shoulder immobilized. The breathing and feeding tubes are removed. You have racked up $625,000 in medical bills so far. You won’t be able to work for months. You can’t do any household chores and will need home attendant care. Under current No-Fault, all of your bills are paid by the car driver. You have home health care, payments for wage loss, and home attendant care paid for by the car driver’s insurance company.

Under the “Beau-Fault” insurance proposal, you’d save $80 on your PIP and a portion of your MCCA, but your benefits are capped at whatever the car driver has purchased for themselves. If they have a $250,000 PIP cap with $20,000 residual liability coverage, you now have maximum coverage of $270,000.00. BUT you owe $625.000! YOU are responsible for $355,000! Beau says, “Pass it over to your health care provider — Obamacare is the law of the land.” You still would have no wage loss benefit, no home health care services, and no home attendant services for chores or hygiene help. How long before the health care insurers raise their rates to cover these new expenditures?

We all want lower insurance premiums, not benefit reductions! Ask Beau how this works at BeauLaFave@house.mi.gov.