Action seeking PIP benefits for attendant care; Default cap on attendant care after the 2019 amendments to the No-Fault Act (NFA); MCL 500.3157(10); Exceptions to the default cap; MCL 500.3157(11); Allowable expenses; Less than unlimited coverage under the 2019 amendments to the NFA; MCL 500.3107c; State Farm Mut Auto Ins Co v Fortin Estate; “Allowable Expenses (Medical)” & “Unlimited person Primary”; Contract interpretation

Holding that the trial court erred by granting defendant-insurer’s (Home-Owners) motion for partial summary disposition because plaintiff-insured’s (Terry) auto insurance policy provided for unlimited allowance expenses, which included attendant care, the court reversed and remanded. Plaintiff and his son were injured in a car accident, after which they received attendant care 24 hours per day. They sued defendant to recover the cost for this care as part of Terry’s PIP benefits. Terry estimated he incurred $157,584 in attendant care expenses. Defendant argued that the 2019 amendments to the NFA capped plaintiffs’ attendant care at 8 hours per day, or 56 hours a week. The trial court agreed. On appeal, the court noted that while it recognized the trial court’s concerns, they were “inapplicable to the present case because of the policy’s particular language. The policy explicitly listed ‘Allowable Expenses (Medical),’ which explicitly included attendant care, and Terry selected unlimited coverage. This was not a situation in which Terry selected a mere unlimited dollar amount for PIP coverage and later sought to extrapolate this to attendant care.” Rather, he “explicitly selected boundless and infinite coverage for allowable expenses, which included attendant care. The policy did not list any exceptions.” As such, the court did “not believe MCL 500.3157(10) and (11) were rendered meaningless by Terry’s interpretation. The policy in the present case was clear and unambiguous in its language.” The court noted that “nothing about Terry’s interpretation prevents future parties from allowing for unlimited PIP benefits in terms of the dollar amount while still restricting attendant care hours to 56 hours per week. To avoid the result in the present case, insurers must simply not allow insureds to select unlimited allowable expenses.” Nothing in MCL 500.3157(11) “requires that an insured must use special language beyond the ‘unlimited’ language used in the policy.” As to the policy language providing “that allowable expenses were ‘subject to limitations of Chapter 31 of the Michigan Insurance Code[,]’” it appeared this was included “merely to alert the parties that the policy was subject to the various statutory limitations” in the NFA. “Many of these limitations, such as the hourly cap within MCL 500.3157(11), are able to be contracted around.” Finally, defendant’s argument “ignored the opening language of the policy’s PIP benefits section.” Defendant was “not entitled to partial summary disposition on the issue of Terry’s attendant care claims because Terry was not limited to 56 hours per week.”