[Auto] Mitch Albom: Our most vulnerable auto crash victims are about to be struck again

[_Happy boy]

 

One day you are yourself, the next day you are not. All you remember is the car swerving. Or the impact of the truck. Or maybe you don’t remember anything, but you wake up in the hospital with a halo around your neck and you can’t feel your toes or your feet or your legs or your hands and your life is forever changed. A part of it is over for good.

This is not something that only happens to others. It could be you. It could be your child. It could be your spouse.

It could be today.

We talk so much about social justice and treating people right and watching out for others and making sure we don’t hurt anyone. Well. A law passed two years ago, sneakily, in the wee hours of a Michigan morning, that wasn’t just, that wasn’t right, that hurts people, all in exchange for an over-hyped promise of lower insurance rates.

And the damage it is about to do will be immeasurable.

robbed us of our most unique offering to our fellow citizens — unlimited, lifetime medical care to those involved in catastrophic auto accidents — is now about to shut down the way our state cares for its most vulnerable po[CENSORED]tion.

It will rob them of the places they go and the people they depend upon.

It will make thousands of health care workers unemployed.

And it will leave the patients they once cared for, as Erica Coulston, who has been in a wheelchair the last 20 years, puts it: “terrified.”

Insult on top of injury.

Leaving people high and dry
Here’s the problem. Part of the new law demands that, as of July 1, the businesses that care for our most severely injured must make a 45% reduction in their fees.

That’s 45 percent. Find me many businesses that can still operate when forced to cut their rates by 45%. There aren’t too many — and certainly not in the fields of attendant care, home care or rehabilitation care.

[ Some Detroiters could see higher car insurance rates under no-fault reform ]

Those nurses that come to your home and change your bandages and help you bathe and get you in and out of your wheelchair? You think they can keep doing that with a 45% reduction?

That rehab place with all those smiling therapists who use those amazing machines to move your limbs and retrain your legs? You think that place stays open with a 45% reduction?