Finally, ‘Deceptive Doctors’ Targeted In No-Fault Insurance Fraud Crackdown

States adopt no-fault insurance laws to lower insurance premiums and make it easier for accident victims to receive medical treatment, regardless of who is at fault. Usually, no-fault insurers pay medical providers directly, assuming that a licensed doctor provided the treatment and the treatment was necessary. 

However, authorities say, rampant criminal abuse of New York's no-fault auto insurance system has driven up auto insurance premiums for consumers. Currently, New York has the fourth highest auto insurance rates in the nation. These sky high rates are due, in large part, to heavy fraud in NY's no-fault system that significantly stems from “deceptive doctors” and “medical mills,” which authorities say “plague” the state's no-fault insurance payment system and cost New Yorkers hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance costs. 
 
Now, the New York State Department of Financial Services ("DFS") has issued a new regulation that will enable it to ban doctors who engage in fraudulent and deceptive practices as part of the no-fault system. The regulation implements a 2005 law that gives DFS the power to regulate doctor participation in the no-fault system.
 
It’s hard to argue with a proposal to ban doctors who engage in “fraudulent and deceptive practices.”
 
One might reasonably wonder, however, what took so long.