Unless it’s in the contract, specifically prescribed by law, or one of the parties is deemed to be acting in bad faith (a VERY rare finding), legal fees and costs are never awarded in any state unless I’ve lived and worked in.
I just did a little online checking. From what I saw, it appears that each party pays their own attorney fees but that the losing party can be ordered to pay the winning party’s court costs.
If I’m wrong, let me know.
That happens in the UK. I think it’s pretty unusual in the US.
I’m not sure what grounds I’d base a complaint on. I’m pretty sure insurance companies can choose to not accept a new customer.
But have you directly asked a different company to insure you or are you taking the word of your current agency that no one will insure you so that they can keep your business and not have to hustle to get your deductible?
Get confirmation directly from a different company that no other insurers will cover you.
I think they(the Progressive agents) are shining you on. Make them put it on paper. Don’t fall for it.
Sure, but if it is true that the open claim is preventing you from obtaining insurance, then your complaint is against Progressive for undue delay on settling the claim. The complaint is against Progressive, not the new insurance company. Is Progressive allowed to keep you as a captive customer indefinitely?
First, there’s no chance that you are being “scammed” by progressive. They aren’t my favorite insurer, but they are a legitimate insurance company that’s large enough to get a lot of regulatory scrutiny. Insurance companies that mishandle claims in bad faith (intentionally failing to pursue your claim, for instance) rack up enormous fines and judgements.
It’s a low cost/low service carrier, and it’s entirely possible your claim is being handled by an adjuster who is incompetent, lazy, or grossly overworked. It’s also possibly they are working diligently and have been unable to squeeze the money out of the trucking company. If that’s the case, well, you are far better off having had them pay everything but your deductible, because otherwise you would have been out the entire amount.
Second,
That varies by state. Personal auto is highly regulated, and in many states they can only reject a customer for specified reasons, and then the customer basically gets assigned to some carrier by the state. (The “assigned risk pool”.) But more importantly, your having an open claim where you weren’t at fault isn’t a reason a company would WANT to reject your business. I’m about 98% certain your agent misled you, and about 66% certain they did so on purpose, to maximize their revenue.
Try shopping around. Just because you are no longer a customer doesn’t free progressive of the obligation to pursue your claim.
And let us know what the state department of insurance says.
No, this isn’t the case. My insurance agency represents a bunch of different insurance companies. Progressive is only one of them.
With my policy up for renewal, I told my agency I didn’t want a Progressive policy any more and asked them to get my quotes on equivalent policies through the other companies they represent.
Nobody at the agency works for Progressive and they’re not the ones who are supposed to be pursuing my claim.
As for keeping my business, the way to have done that would have been to switch me to another company like I asked. With them saying they can’t do so, I’m going to be looking for a policy with a company that they don’t represent.
The agency gets incentives from the companies they represent. They aren’t working for you, they are working for those companies.
Which is exactly what several of us have suggested you do. Several times.
Get insured somewhere else. Once covered, stop paying your Progressive premium.
If you don’t receive your deductible, document everything and report your former agency to your state’s insurance regulatory commission.
Well , asking them to get quotes is more work than just renewing your Progressive policy , which will be no work at all. Which actually might be why they are telling you no other company will write you a policy, Or maybe Progressive pays better than the other companies. It’s stupid of them, because people don’t have to use any sort of insurance agency anymore. They can buy directly from the company. But that doesn’t mean the agent isn’t doing that.
You’re saying these companies are giving incentives to the agency to turn away customers?
That’s a pretty poor business model.
I don’t know why you feel I’m arguing this point. I said I would be doing that in the OP.
I take it to mean that Progressive is paying your agent more than other companies to keep you signed up. So your agent might just tell you a little fib that you can’t get insurance elsewhere.
We renewed our homeowners and car insurance with the same company eight years in a row using an agent that assured us we were paying the lowest premium she could find among all the companies she represented.
After the second consecutive 20% premium increase, we went to another agent. The quote was lower than our current premium, almost 25% lower than what we were quoted for renewal by our old agent.
For the exact same coverage. Our new company is also represented by our old agent. Apparently it’s a practice in insurance agencies to just renew with the same company and assure your “clients” that they are getting the best rate. Many, like us, will not try to verify this for many renewals.
If they actually “shopped” every renewal, they’d need more staff.
From going to the new agent’s office and watching them work, things are way less automated than I had thought. I imagined they could plug in the coverages in one system and get quotes from 8-10 companies that they represented. But it seems like they have to go to each company’s portal and type in all the information each time.
And the commission the agent gets isn’t just a flat fee, or a flat x% of premium. The contracts can be complicated, and might reward and agent for writing at least x% of their business with the company, or for having customers with more “tenure”, or… Your agent may have had any manner of financial incentives to encourage you to stick with Progressive. They may also feel they are more likely to recover that deductible from progressive if you remain a customer of progressive. But that’s very different from “another company won’t write you”.
A few random comments.
The idea of escalating this to your state insurance regulator is an excellent one. Another thought is that decent insurance companies tend to have an ombudsman who you can appeal to for help in these sorts of situations. In fact, that’s often the preferred approach before going to the regulators.
As for the qualities of various home and auto insurers, I was with State Farm for many decades, every since my first car and then first home insurance. Never had a problem with them, though I never had an auto accident claim, but did have one or two claims under “comprehensive”.
Here in Canada, State Farm built a new headquarters building around 15 years ago and then, in the typical fashion of a directionless bureaucracy that has no idea what it’s doing, sold the entire Canadian business to the domestic entity Desjardins. My policies just automatically switched over and I haven’t had any problems with them, either.
I had a fairly significant claim with Desjardins on damage to my roof during a freak hailstorm (the entire neighbourhood was affected and must have cost home insurers a bundle!). On the plus side, they paid the claim without question, even though the cheap builder’s shingles were replaced with high quality architectural shingles. On the minus side, the agent’s office informed me that another claim would result in my rates going up. It’s apparently futile trying to explain to an insurance company that I’m not personally responsible for the weather! 
On the subject of shopping around for cheaper insurance rates, I’ve always been a little wary of that, especially if I’m comfortable with the insurer that I’m with. A “better deal” isn’t necessarily much of a deal if you’re going to have trouble getting coverage when you need it.
That’s possible, by the way, although less likely in these days of electronic files. I think I’ve said i recently retired from working as an actuary for the property casualty industry. I once was estimating how much my employer would owe in the future on a certain block of business. One of the major inputs to that estimation is how much the claims department thinks they still have to pay, called the “case reserves”. One year, the case reserves jumped in a weird way, so we asked the claims department what caused that jump. They had discovered a forgotten room full of claim files. For real.
That company is no longer in business, fwiw. But weird shit can happen.
And as i mentioned above, it’s also possible that Progressive is diligently pursuing the money, but it’s having difficulty wresting it from the liable party. Maybe their check to their insurer bounced and the insurer denied the claim and it’s going back and forth between those two parties. Maybe someone on that end is just sleazy and is refusing to pay. (Note that Progressive has a legal obligation to take them to court on your behalf of that’s true, but there’s no guarantee they will win the case.) Maybe Progressive doesn’t want to pay to take them to court, because they think the legal fees will be more than they’ll recover (because they 100% won’t recover their legal fees from the other party in an ordinary insurance dispute). That last would be “bad faith” on the part of Progressive, which is why it’s worth your getting the state insurance commissioner involved. Maybe Progressive already took the other party to court, and lost the case, and doesn’t owe you anything, but your agent doesn’t understand that, or is intentionally misleading you because they know you’ll be upset to hear that.
There are lots of possibilities of what’s really going on.
Anyway, I’m glad to hear you got the state involved, because they are the only party that has real leverage here.
No, but if the area is prone to bad weather your cost to them is higher. And careless customers have bigger claims from the same event, although, “roof damaged by hail” is rarely caused by carelessness. Still, there is a correlation, even for “weather” claims.
On the one hand, you can almost always find a lower premium by shopping around, because premium calculations are very complicated and each company will think your risk is a little different and how they estimate that varies from year to year. And they may even gave a discount for new business to try to grow their “book”. On the other hand, some companies definitely have better service than others. I have insurance through USAA, and my husband used to show me cheaper quotes we’d get in the mail, and i always said, “i want to stick with USAA”. Because one thing i learned working in the insurance industry is that USAA is the industry leader in “customer satisfaction”, and I’ll be upset enough by a claim that i don’t also want to be upset by my insurance company. I might be, of course. But my odds are better if i stick with a company that is trying to optimize customer satisfaction.
And they have treated me well over the years, including noticing that an auto dealer was trying to rob us (by literally registering a different car in our name than the one we’d negotiated to buy). That phone call from some clerk at USAA allowed us to extract ourselves before we were robbed.
When I lived in Philadelphia I was rear ended at a red light. Minor damage, mostly just my drivers seat was broken.
The guy I took my car to for an estimate winked his eye and said he’d “take care of me “.
Apparently he knew the adjuster and indeed, he took care of me. When I dropped the car off he gave me $500 cash, which was my deductible.
He fixed my drivers seat, and had someone wash and wax my car. He charged the insurance company for fixing frame damage (which wasn’t there).
A few months later I got a check for $500 from the insurance company in the mail, which was my recovered deductible. I made money on the deal!