Senate Bill 28 Is No Solution to Crisis of Care for Auto Accident Victims

Group urges Michigan leaders to return to the table and enact meaningful legislation

LANSING, Mich.—(July 15, 2021)— CPAN President Devin Hutchings today issued the following statement after Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed Senate Bill 28 into law.

"Senate Bill 28 has been touted by lawmakers as a solution to protect access to care for severely injured auto accident survivors, but the reality is that it merely adds bureaucratic hurdles—at taxpayer expense—to a new job-killing, patient-upending fee schedule.

This year, several narrow, bipartisan, long-term fixes were introduced during the legislative session, which would have kept ethical providers in business and preserved cost controls introduced as part of 2019’s insurance reform package. Those bills were never even brought to the floor for debate.

SB 28 is no solution. Rather, it’s a smoke screen hiding the fact that the insurance industry and its lobbyists are the primary beneficiaries. Instead of sitting down with patient advocates and post-acute care providers to hammer out a solution that didn’t require small businesses to close or vulnerable patients to experience a sudden disruption in care, lawmakers instead threw taxpayer dollars at a problem of their own making—while more than $23 billion sits unused in the Michigan Catastrophic Claims Association fund.

CPAN strongly encourages Michigan leaders to return to the table and enact real, meaningful changes that will protect accident victims’ right to recover—a right that was guaranteed.”