Police say that Mr. Perry accused a woman of hitting him with her vehicle this summer. Mr. Perry claimed he was hit when the woman was backing out of a parking spot on West 11th Street. He then spoke to the woman’s insurance company and claimed he’d had $13,000 in medical bills.
However, surveillance tape from a nearby business showed that Mr. Perry had not been hit by the woman’s vehicle, police say.
An arraignment is not a trial and accused is not the same as guilty so we will refrain from commenting further on Mr. Perry. But insurance fraud in general is a shameful matter. In truth, it doesn’t victimize insurance companies and their shareholders. The companies simply increase premiums to cover their losses. The real victims are policyholders and the legitimately injured.
Policyholders obviously pay increased premiums to cover the investigative personnel and increased loss payments associated with fraud. Less obvious is the harm to the legitimately injured, who end up having their claims denied and delayed partly because insurance companies use the fraud of others as a pretense for the excessively lengthy and intrusive investigations performed on the innocent injured.
Insurance fraud also taints the perspective of jurors who come to trials already biased against injury claimants because, they suspect, so many of them are frauds. As a consequence, one of the weirdest burdens we face at trial is persuading a jury that a client who has been treating with medical doctors for years is really hurt.
The Erie lawyers at Purchase, George & Murphey, P.C. are committed to providing free information to the public about safety information, injuries and the cases that result from them. For more information, try our articles library where we offer free information on Pennsylvania personal injury cases of all sorts, including car accidents , commercial truck accidents , motorcycle accidents , medical malpractice injuries, dog bite injuries, slip and falls and other injury cases .