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26 San Diego L. Rev. 993 (1989)
No-Fault Auto Insurance: Back by Popular (Market) Demand

handle is hein.journals/sanlr26 and id is 1005 raw text is: No-Fault Auto Insurance: Back By Popular (Market) Demand? JEFFREY O'CONNNELL* In America, there are three ways to get rich. You can work hard (but that's no fun). You can win a lottery (perfect-except for the long odds). Or you can get in a car wreck and sue. Due to the publicity that surrounds astronomical jury awards for such dubious injuries as whiplash, it's this last path to wealth-the fender bender-that sometimes seems to offer the truest promise. Foreigners must be mystified by those American bumper stickers that say, GO AHEAD, HIT ME-I COULD USE THE MONEY! This, thinks the visitor from abroad, truly is the land of opportunity, where you can acquire great wealth just by getting your Ford bashed up. But closer inspection shows this system contains more tarnish than shine.' Under most forms of insurance, after one proves one is injured, one is reimbursed by one's own insurer for one's economic losses. But in the tort system, one must prove a case against someone else's in- surer showing not only that one was injured, but that it was someone else's fault. One must thus be prepared to go to court, after typical delays of several years, where one's fate turns on the vagaries of (by definition) inexpert jurors, with the award (assuming there is one) cut by as much as half because of a lawyer's contingent fee and other litigation expenses. To make matters worse, tort law consist- ently undercompensates the more seriously injured while routinely overcompensating the less seriously injured. The key to this overcom- pensation is payment for pain and suffering which, in most cases does not track actual discomfort or agony, but rather, amounts to a routine multiple of three or four times medical expenses. Claimants are thereby encouraged to run up their medical bills, in turn creating * John Allan Love Professor of Law, University of Virginia; B.A., 1951, Dartmouth College; J.D., 1954, Harvard University. 1. Spiro & Mirvisn, Whose No-Fault is it Anyway?, WASH. MONTHLY, Oct. 1989, at 24.