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The Michigan Court of Appeals finally came through for thousands of crash victims, deciding that the part of the no-fault auto insurance reform that had, in effect, eliminated their coverage violated the state constitution.
That ruling comes as welcome news to nearly 18,000 catastrophically injured survivors, their families and friends.
These were the people who had paid into the system, suffered devastating injuries in traffic crashes, and had counted on Michigan's catastrophic coverage to ensure their needed care for the rest of their lifetimes.
Thanks to the court, it appears that the rates paid to their caregivers will be restored - although how this restoration will actually happen isn't clear yet. And only those survivors who paid into the system prior to the enactment of the reforms in 2019 will be impacted by this ruling.
But that's something.
Until this breakthrough, the law reduced reimbursement rates by 45% for rehabilitation facilities, home care agencies and family care providers. The cuts made providing these services unsustainable and decimated that entire sector of the industry. It drove some businesses out of providing that specific kind of care and it drove some providers out of business.
The cuts ultimately ended up shifting care for these crash survivors to others -- mostly family members or friends who had to figure out ways to provide the care. If they couldn't, some crash survivors ended up in nursing homes that weren't equipped to provide the level of care they needed.
It would seem appropriate -- with the state, in effect, victimizing these victims -- that the ruling would have turned on issues pertaining to humane treatment.
It did not.
The key argument in the appellate court decision was the contracts clause in the state constitution.
And, remarkably, the ruling was not unanimous. One justice, Jane Markey, dissented, but the other two found that the reforms could not be applied retroactively to these crash victims.
Even if they had allowed for retroactivity, Justices Douglas Shapiro and Sima Patel noted, they found such a clear violation of the contracts clause of the constitution that it would have outweighed other considerations.
Shapiro wrote: "Since the insurers have already been paid for the benefits promised under those policies, retroactive application would permit insurers to retain all the premiums paid prior to the 2019 amendments while allowing them to provide only a fraction of the benefits set out in those policies.
"Giving a windfall to insurance companies who received premiums for unlimited benefits is not a legitimate public purpose, nor a reasonable means to reform the system."
Exactly.
-- Traverse City Record-Eagle