So a for profit corporation, in business to make money, should pay when not legally required to out of the goodness of its heart??? That’s absurd. I know it’s easy to hate insurance companies, but how is it immoral to pay exactly what has been contracted for?
What if I don’t buy flood insurance, but have regular homeowners and my house is destroyed by flood? Should they do the “moral” thing and pay? Where is this higher moral duty in a strict business relationship and what are the parameters of it? Does it go both ways? Is there a situation where I should do MORE for my insurance company than I am legally obligated to do? What is that situation?
Again, it sounds like everyone who is mad at Progressive should be mad at the Maryland legislature instead.
I’m well aware of how insurance is supposed to work, thank you.
Let me repeat myself:
Besides, your statement doesn’t address the concerns that Progressive did not handle this impartially, such as dismissing one witness’s testimony in favor of another’s. There’s a significant difference in investigation to ensure someone doesn’t get a payout they’re not entitled to and manipulating things to provide the desired outcome.
It seems to me insurance companies frequently cross the line between “trying not to pay false claims” to just “trying not to pay”, period. This may be well within their legal rights, but to treat people that way when they’ve just been hit by personal tragedy is truly scummy.
One anecdotal example:
A guy I work with had his roof torn off by a tornado. He had to deal with the insurance guy arguing every point “How do we know that water damage wasn’t there before the tornado”, etc. (He’d just bought the house a year before, so the chances that he had stupidly bought a house with major damage to it, or managed to cause a bunch of tornado-like damage in 1 year of ownership only to then, coincidentally, be hit by a tornado…)
Fortunately for my coworker, he had done a videotaped walk through right after he bought the place. So he was eventually able to force the insurance company to pay up. But that’s just it, he shouldn’t have to force them. An honorable insurance company (if such a thing existed), would say "Yeah, this looks like tornado damage, and we know the town just got hit by a tornado. Let’s not be complete assholes just to pad our bottom line.
And yes, if that means everyone pays a little more in insurance so people who’ve lost loved ones to car accidents or natural disasters don’t get treated like dirt, it’s worth it. And I’d gladly pay a little more to be sure I (or my loved ones) aren’t treated that way when tragedy strikes. But I don’t think I even have that option, because as far as I can tell every insurance company is run by assholes, even while they all swear up and down that you can count on them in your time of need.
Nobody reads the contracts. That’s why insurance companies have agents and customer service people, to explain your policy in plain English so you don’t have to bother scanning the fine print. That’s not how normal people want to operate.
My sister-in-law works at Progressive, and she told me that Progressive was a party to the lawsuit. The AP story in the OP claims that Progressive “interjected” itself into the lawsuit. I’m thinking this might be bad reporting.
There’s nothing ignorant about not being willing to spend any amount of your precious, precious lifespan reading an insurance contract from cover to cover so that you can not find some cunning loophole.
Even if I did, since I’m not an insurance professional, or lawyer I wouldn’t have noticed that this
actually means “We will cheerfully mount an aggressive legal defense for the under/uninsured driver who killed our customer, so we can avoid paying any money to our customer’s orphaned children.”
This ended up being a major PR nightmare for Progressive. I understand the decedents lawyer stated that Progressive quickly settled when the video the brother made went viral. The lawyer claimed the settlement was for 10s of thousands of dollars more than they had sought.
One wonders what would have happened if the PR had not backfired on them.
Quote from the blog post that set all this off: Out of a sense of honor, and out of a sense of the cost of my sister’s outstanding student loans, my folks opted to try to go after the money through legal channels. At which point they learned another delightful thing. In Maryland, you may not sue an insurance company when they refuse to fork over your money. Instead, what they had to do was sue the guy who killed my sister, establish his negligence in court, and then leverage that decision to force Progressive to pay the policy.
Those contracts are written specifically to be illegible to any normal person. If the rate of full review and comprehension of contracts is something like 1% it stands to logic that the measurement of the quality of an insurance product lies mostly outside the actual contract. Verbal summary by insurance retailers, industry standards, advertising assertions ect.
The same is true for many types of contract. My mortgage contract was over 100 pages long and in order to get funding in time for the home purchase we had th notary/rep come to the house for electronic signatures. If we didn’t rely on the representative for the summary of the content of the contract we would not have had time to sign and get funding. Our mortgage is a good low fixed rate and works as we expected it to. A tape recorder and good questioning gave us our peace of mind.
Using the law to rob people will only be legal so long as good people do nothing. It is only profitable when people don’t go public and drag the company through the mud and into the daylight when they’re obviously being amoral people who do not deserve to be in their industry.
The defense of this company by people in this thread is disgusting.
So, given the facts as we know them in this case, what are you saying?
Progressive just couldn’t find a way to justify coverage, but they probably wanted to pay out.
Progressive acted in a reasonable manner, using common industry practices, and the criticism in unwarranted.
I’ve never heard of a story like this, but if it’s true, Progressive was acting way out of bounds of normal insurance practices in order to deny payment.
Emphasis mine. It looks to me like the AP reported this story poorly. They made it sound like Progressive butted in to the lawsuit by assisting the defendant, when in actuality they were a party to the suit.