A small group of auto accident survivors and care providers gathered on Mackinac Island during the Mackinac Policy Conference on May 29, 2024. (Photo: Anna Liz Nichols)
The group was small and half-mile downhill from the Mackinac Policy Conference where lawmakers are meeting to talk decision-making, but auto crash survivors and advocates arrived at Mackinac Island Wednesday to call for the Legislature to fix a policy signed at the conference five years ago.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signs the auto insurance reform bill, May 30, 2019 | Andrew Roth
In 2019, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed a major reform to Michigan’s no-fault auto insurance at the conference in the Grand Hotel. At the time Whitmer said “It’s not perfect. … But this is a big step forward.”
But the new rules have had devastating consequences on survivors of auto accidents, as they’ve told lawmakers that parts of the change created a new fee schedule for health care providers that began in 2021. Rehabilitative and long term care services without Medicare codes were cut to a 55% reimbursement rate.
Jenna Worthy, who sustained a spinal injury from a car crash in July 2019, said that her at-home health care providers are going to stop offering her services in September as they can no longer afford to provide her care.
“I was seeing gains and improvements. I’m quadriplegic and I don’t have much movement in my hands, but I was able to gain some movement back,” Worthy said. “For a moment I was able to do assisted standing with my therapist and stuff which would keep my legs going stronger.”
But now as care providers are able to come less and less, Worthy said she’s losing opportunities to maintain her progress.
“There’s days that I won’t have caregivers come in. … I just gotta kind of hang out in bed and I have to call somebody to come and get my kids because I can’t even have my kids at home with me,” Worthy said. “I just have to be bed bound and hope that I have everything next to my bed that I need. I can’t safely transfer into my chair without somebody with me.”
Bills to alter the changes made under the 2019 rules in an effort to allow care providers to be compensated more for services so they continue to offer care cleared the Michigan Senate in October, and have sat in a House committee since.
The Department of Insurance and Financial Services (DIFS) opposes the bills, with DIFS Director Anita Fox sending lawmakers a letter saying the measures would lead to higher auto insurance rates for Michiganders.
“… [T]he broad-brush reimbursement rate increases proposed in these bills would substantially impact auto insurance affordability across the state…Increased insurance rates would likely lead to more uninsured drivers and less competition in the insurance marketplace, which could further increase insurance rates,” Fox said in the letter.
After a car crash, doctors said Courtnie Bush was brain dead. Now she’s graduating.
For years auto crash survivors and their families have rallied regularly at the state Capitol pursuing lawmakers to fix the no-fault auto law in order to maintain care and services.
It’s a challenge for survivors to be able to make the trips to the Capitol and on Wednesday to Mackinac, said Laura Haynes President and CEO of the Michigan HomeCare and Hospice Association. And the conference where all the lawmakers are is located on top of a large hill, so the crowd of wheelchaired gatherers could not reasonably all make it up to try and talk with lawmakers.
“When they’re reading bills, the people that are in those rooms are not the survivors. Oftentimes, it’s the lobbyists; it’s the insurance companies; it’s all of these other groups. They are not the survivors,” Haynes said of the importance of auto crash survivors continuing to show up in-person. “They need to fully understand what these cuts have done to survivors … The survivors need to matter.”
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