Insurance Claims
Insurance companies love money, especially your money. Whether it is automobile insurance, homeowner’s insurance, life insurance, health insurance, property insurance, or commercial insurance, they absolutely love it when you pay them money for premiums, and they absolutely hate it when you make a claim that might require them to pay any of that money back out. Making money and hanging onto that money is their business. They know every trick of the trade and every game that can be played in order to refuse payment on a claim. Unfortunately, this results in the victim – i.e., you – being deprived of a contractual benefit which you paid them to guarantee. The only way to thwart the insurance companies’ manipulation of this process is to ensure that you are represented by someone who has the experience and resolve necessary to fight for you, not to protect the insurance companies’ balance sheet.
Insurance companies have spent decades perfecting this process and concealing it from their consumers. They even disguise the hoax within their own company by segregating the different departments from one another. For example, an insurance company would never allow a sales agent to make a decision with respect to a claim. This is because the agent depends on the customer for his or her own income, and if a customer presented a valid claim to the agent, the agent would almost certainly approve it for payment. The insurance company tries to avoid such a situation, so it hires adjusters, who are often faceless and unfamiliar with the policy holder, to investigate and deny the claims. In many situations, the agent is appalled to find out that the company has denied a customer’s claim, but there is nothing the agent can do about it. Rather than ensuring that customers are satisfied with the product, claims adjusters focus instead on finding excuses to deny the claim. The result is that, while the marketing, actuarial, and underwriting departments focus on bringing money into the company, the claims department focuses on keeping that money within the company.
In each industry, whether it is automobile insurance, disability insurance, homeowners’ insurance, life insurance, health insurance, property insurance, etc., the terminology or tactics may change, but the goal is the same: Insurance companies routinely employ strategies designed to delay the claim, to intimidate claimants into abandoning their claim or accepting a much smaller amount in compromise, to fabricate a flimsy excuse to deny the claims altogether, or, if they cannot intimidate the claimants or coerce the claimants into abandoning the claim, to force the claims into litigation, where their defense lawyers will make the claimants’ lives so miserable they will wish they had never filed the claims in the first place. The lawyers at Lacy Law Firm know how to beat the insurance companies at their own game.