Crash Course: 411-PAIN network will not line their pockets with your insurance money

This booming business is made possible by Florida's insurance laws. Florida is a "no fault" insurance state. If someone crashes into your car, your insurance is supposed to pick up the tab for treating your injuries, and the other person's insurance will cover theirs. It doesn't matter who caused the accident. The idea is to avoid the cost of expensive lawsuits and skyrocketing premiums.

All Florida drivers are required to carry a minimum of $10,000 in personal insurance protection (PIP) insurance. If you're injured in an accident and can't work, that $10,000 is supposed to cover 80 percent of your medical bills and/or 60 percent of your lost wages, according to the state Department of Financial Services.

Ideally, doctors would provide only the services that are medically necessary and the insurance companies would pay the bills promptly. But the system gets perverted by doctors who inflate fees and lawyers who profit from battling insurance companies to collect those fees. There are various ways that fraud can occur. Some people stage car accidents or fake injuries simply to collect the PIP money. In other cases, a patient has a legitimate but minor injury. His doctor knows that a pot of $10,000 is available, so to get the entire amount, the doctor will run up the patient's bill with expensive tests and treatment he may not need.

"It's become a dollar target," says Lynne Christiana, Florida representative for the Insurance Information Institute, an industry-funded nonprofit. "And people will find that the benefits magically end when you reach that $10,000 limit."

In Florida, the problem is especially severe. "Florida leads the entire nation in PIP fraud," says John Atkins, director of the state's Division of Insurance Fraud."You are talking about tens of thousands of fraudulent claims. We have always been overwhelmed."

Lawyers make money from accidents and PIP claims too, because they step in to fight skeptical insurance companies and force them to pay the doctor bills. The lawyers charge hefty hourly fees and take a percentage of any insurance monies won.

Although decrying fraud in the system, some personal injury lawyers and doctors say PIP is necessary to cover urgent medical care for car accident victims without other forms of health insurance. In 2007, the state Legislature considered ending the PIP requirement. The Florida Hospital Association protested, saying that 40 percent of people sent to emergency rooms after a crash have no health insurance other than PIP.

"Without PIP, consumers' health insurance policies will rise to cover their injuries — as well as those of the uninsured," Rich Morrison, corporate vice president of the association, said at the time. "Robbing Peter to pay Paul and shifting the medical costs of uninsured motorists to insured ones is not in the best interest of Floridians."

And Cris Boyer, a Margarete personal injury attorney, argues insurance companies are also to blame for driving up costs. Insurers "routinely and unreasonably deny valid claims," Boyer wrote in an October 2010 Florida Bar Journal article. They "drive up legal fees by causing expensive and protracted litigation."