Yeah, maybe I do need to get off my high horse awhile.
I'm sure part of my insurance company enmity comes from having to waste
valuable court and jury time trying niggling cases that could have been settled
for, at most, a couple of thousand dollars. Some of them may have been a
little "iffy" in terms of liability or damages, or even both, but these
companies preferred to pay their lawyers more to try the cases than it would
have cost to settle them. That's their prerogative, of course. But the $2000
a day it costs to have a jury trial comes out of the taxpayers' pockets, not
theirs, and they chose to just be hard asses and abuse the system for what they
call "principle." We had another name for it. I won't state the name the two
companies best known for this practice, but this sentence has a clue within it.
My favorite insurance case, from about 10 years ago, involved the death of a
30-something-year-old woman. She had been a smoker, but had quit, then took
out a $250,000 non-smoker life insurance policy. For those who don't know,
most life insurance policies have a two-year period of contestability, during
which, if you've misrepresented material facts in your application for
insurance, the insurer can cancel the policy or deny any claim thereunder.
Eighteen months after the date of the policy, during a heavy rainstorm, a
stopped-up culvert was backing water up into the yard of the family home, so
this little lady, unwisely, went out alone in the early morning hours, with her
husband and children still asleep, and attempted to unblock the culvert. She
ended up being successful, but too much so, and was swept into the culvert and
drowned.
The insurance company spent thousands of dollars on an invasive investigation
and managed to come up with a single fuzzy photograph, taken at an after-hours
birthday party at the bank where the woman worked, of her puffing on a
cigarette about a year after the policy's date. Based on that, and that alone,
they denied coverage.
To make a long story short, after a five-day trial, during which many people
testified that they never saw her smoke except that one time, the jury returned
a verdict in favor of the plaintiffs (the woman's husband and two children) for
the full amount of the policy, plus $100,000 in attorney's fees, and $5,000,000
in punitive damages.
Of course, it didn't help that the insurance company lawyers were a pair of
obnoxious, excitable twits, and the plaintiffs' attorney was the then future,
and now former, governor of Georgia, Roy Barnes, who's about as skilled at
being a low-key, lovable good old boy as anybody could imagine. I clearly
recall his closing argument and the repeated theme of, "It just ain't right."
The jury agreed it just wuddn't right. The verdict was appealed and upheld.
We were all satisfied, except the insurance company and its lawyers. Sometimes
justice does prevail and the good guys win.
Walt, changing channels
--
"Anything more than 500 yards from
the car just isn't photogenic." --
Edward Weston
-------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "Geilfuss Charles" <Charles.Geilfuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> Walt, you sure are being irrascable today, so turn around and allow me
> to extract that burr you got stuck under your saddle. I suspect you've been
> watching too much Katrina coverage which is enough to put anyone in a bad
> mood.
--snip--
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