Damn Their Eyes

The past few weeks I've been dealing with insurance problems and I'm becoming expert on the things insurance people can do to keep from paying a claim. Granted the greater proportion of claims are paid in a timely manner but in every industry there are people who seem to delight in making life hard for those they deal with.

The National Flood Insurance Program is a federally mandated and underwritten program that is administered by FEMA who ultimately pay out on all flood damage claims. Commercial insurance companies and local agents write and service flood policies but their risk is minimal and their economic exposure is infinitesimal. Nevertheless I have had scores of people telling me about their issues with the insurance company.

Could you produce a sales receipt for the coach you bought 20 years ago? And if you could find where you had filed that ancient receipt what do you do when all your records were washed away in the flood. But it seeems to be a requirement by some companies that if you can't produce a receipt for every item they will deny the entire claim...until you can prove when you bought and how much you paid for the item.

Then there are the companies that claim that their adjuster, the person who looked at your loss and wrote it up has never sent them the paperwork. Three months later and they never bother to tell you that their agent failed to do his job! And of course there are the companies who just never perform. The client keeps calling and they always tell them "next month" until someone (usually the client) gives up in dispair after using his own funds to pay for repairs the insurance is supposed to cover.

None of this is FEMA's fault, they are depending on the insurance companies to do their job. But when the client is at the end of their tether they usually end up talking to me since I'm usually the first human contact they can reach. I can help, I can refer to higher authority, but I cannot give the people back the time they have lost while waitng for the insurer to do the job in a timely manner.

That's not the worst of the crimes some companies commit. All mortgage companies require that purchesers of property within a defined flood zone have both property and flood insurance in force. It's logical that they want to protect their invesment. On more than one occasion I've been approached by a homeowner who was sold "flood insurance" by their mortgage ccomapany, with the particiption of an insurance company that was nothing more than a declining balance mortgage insurance. After the flood has totaled their home the couple who had been sold "flood insurance", and it said so in bolded letters on the insurance policy get a letter saying that the mortgage on their house had been paid off and that they were responsible for any and all repairs to the house.

Words fail me.