Minnesota passed a law this year stating that procedural pages, or P-pages, must be used by all parties involved in a collision repair estimate—no deviation from the IP is allowed. I have heard that other states are thinking about similar legislation. Do you know of any drawbacks before I push for this in our state?
The only drawback I see in this legislation is that it has to occur at all. But I think we have been left with no other alternative. We want “communication” between insurers and repair facilities, yet abuse dictates the need for such legislation.
P-pages describe the included and not-included labor operations within the labor time guide for a repair. Before this law passed, a carrier could override the selected IP’s labor times and use another’s lower times for certain aspects of a repair. Minnesota now requires that the insurance carrier, repair facility, appraisal company or any other industry professional abide by the P-pages as written only by the agreed selected IP.
“If a carrier tells a repair facility that they must use one of the major information providers, [the carrier] must also be willing to accept that decision in its entirety,” states Judell Anderson, executive director for Alliance of Automotive Service Providers of Minnesota, “which is why we moved forward with the legislation; too many times we found some of the carriers trying to get the best of all three worlds at the collision repairer’s expense.”
Mandating proper use of the P-pages in their entirety could clear up a few other abuses within the industry, including prime, block & feather operations that must occur on every repaired panel or spot blending.
If the desire is to truly “communicate” then we need to agree that when a “guide” is the accepted means for communicating the cost of a loss to a carrier, it is understood that that specific guide and its P-pages in their entirety will be used in assessing those costs accordingly.
Ray Fisher is the president of ASA-Michigan. This article represents his opinion and does not reflect the views of ASA-Michigan.
