(440) 461-5000
or
Tricia_Griffith@progressive.com
When you contact other companies realize that any promises they give you are just as valid as Progressive’s, and that any good stories heard in this thread are probably because no company can cheat everybody.
Two years without explanation = a problem. Call politely and go up the chain. Call corporate if you can’t get resolution. Call the insurance commissioner.
I feel the big issue is whether you can switch insurance companies. If you’re able to do so, this incentivizes companies to offer decent service (or lose their customers to the companies that do).
But if you’re locked in to one company, then that company has minimal incentive to provide you with good service.
And which companies would those be? If a company gets much more decent than the others, I can see the other companies giving them all kinds of shit.
Loved Geico. Farmer’s is pretty good. State Farm is either extraordinary or horrible, no middle ground with them.
State Farm is a mutual company, along with Liberty, AMICA, and smaller ones (though AMICA has a very different membership model). So your local representative has more power, both good and bad. I started driving with State Farm and had zero complaints, I just left because I got a better deal.
Mrs Cad loves State Farm and her service is exemplary. Every time I’ve had to deal with them I’ve gotten screwed over. And IIRC State Farm has one of the lowest payout rates in the industry along with Allstate.
This means Progressive paid for your damages except for your deductible, right? They’re trying to get their money back from the other company too. But Progressive has very little control over this - it’s the other company refusing to pay , whether they are correct in taking this position or not.
I hate to say this, but that’s assuming your agent even called the other companies. Which he might not have because there is no reason an insurance company wouldn’t issue you a policy due to an open claim. I’ve absolutely changed companies with an open claim exactly like yours, where the insurance company was trying to recover my deductible. It’s not even a claim that your insurer is going to have to pay.
This. My story is not directly relevant as it involved health insurance not auto insurance, but the short version of a hellish story well over a year long is that what finally got Aetna to pay up was a letter of complaint to the appropriate regulatory authority.
The funny thing was, I got a very sympathetic, personal letter back from the state insurance regulator, telling me that because of something or other about the situation (it’s been years so I mercifully forget many of the details), they couldn’t actually help me. But the mere fact I wrote to them (cc’ing Aetna, of course) prompted action, whereas a year of phone calls (literally almost every day - I am not exaggerating) had no impact.
I’ve had the same experience with health insurance. The regulator might tell me there is nothing they can do, but the insurer or provider will immediately resolve the issue. They don’t want to get on the regulators radar for $500 or $700 dollars in dodgy charges.
But doesn’t Progressive have a fiduciary duty to Little_Nemo considering he subrogated his right to sue for his $1000 to Progressive. If they other company won’t pay up in this case, wouldn’t Progressive have to sue? And if the insurance company won’t pay, can’t they go after the driver and then make it an issue between him and his insurance company?
I had to deal with a different regulator (auto) over an issue. My experience is that regulators for the most part are very pro-consumer.
Maybe Progressive can and should sue the other driver ( because it would always be the other driver who is sued, not the insurance company) but Progressive wants to get back what they paid out, so I doubt they aren’t bothering at all. Unless they have decided it’s not worthwhile for whatever reason (such as the company having no insurance and gone bankrupt or something). Going to the regulator will most likely get @Little_Nemo an answer but may not get him his money.
Then can the subrogation be cancelled and Little_Nemo sue the other driver for the $1000?
Yes, the total damages was up around fifteen thousand dollars. Progressive paid for all of it except my one thousand dollar deductible.
But I imagine fifteen thousand dollars is not a huge amount to a company like Progressive. They’re apparently not devoting much effort to collecting their portion or mine.
I’m having trouble understanding Progressive’s position on this.
I assume you had collision insurance on your car. Is that right? Was the $1000 the deductible on your collision policy?
The party at fault is responsible for 100% of the damages, not just the deductible. Since you got the car repaired, someone must have paid for it. Even if you had collision insurance, I’d expect Progressive to go after the other party for the entire amount. Otherwise they’d be stuck paying for the non-deductible part of the damages. I find it hard to believe that Progressive would just let that slide. Insurance companies don’t like to lose money.
I see that the repairs cost around $15,000. That’s $14,000 that someone other than you paid, either Progressive or the party at fault. I can’t imagine Progressive letting that slide. They would want their $14,000.
Do you know whether Progressive tried to collect anything from the party at fault, and if so, were they successful? Did they sue? If so, for how much? And did they get a judgment?
Progressive has paid all of the repair costs to the garages beyond the thousand dollars I paid.
As I said, fifteen thousand seems like a large sum to me but Progressive is a large corporation. They may regard it as a trivial amount; the equivalent of a week’s worth of office supplies. They might feel that claims don’t really matter until they hit at least six figures.
So their attempts to collect the money may be minimal. The agent who is working on this claim may be handling hundreds of similar “small” claims. He’ll do things like sending off letters to the various people who owe Progressive money but he doesn’t put too much effort into any one claim.
The other company, which understands the reality of this situation, knows that it can ignore any requests for the money that is due and it will probably get away without paying.
So I don’t believe Progressive has collected anything from the other company. As far as I know, there has been no legal action (I feel I would have been notified at some point if there was).
On a separate note, I have followed the advice I received here and filed a complaint with the NYSDFS.
Please update us when you hear back from the state government.
Just to clarify, IANAL but in this particular case I think it might not be the other driver who would be sued. The vehicle that struck me was a truck owned by a shipping company. So I think it’s the shipping company rather than the driver who has financial liability. This is what I’ve been told anyway.
In addition to not being a lawyer, I’m also not a trucking company executive. But I’ve been told that trucking companies generally do not carry insurance for accidents like this. They just figure they will pay the expenses out of pocket. If this is true, then Progressive is trying to collect directly from the trucking company itself rather than from another insurance company.
Again, I don’t know any of the above as fact. One of the reasons I’m annoyed with Progressive is because they are not passing any information about this claim back to me. All they will tell me is the claim is still open and they are working on it.
This is the third thread I’ve started on this. So count on more.