I won't dispute for one minute that insurance fraud is a problem. But those
cases nearly never come to trial, because lawyers who take such cases get
disbarred and their clients to go jail. Fraud is a problem at the bottom rung
of the insurance process, usually is obvious, and seldom gets farther than a
competent adjuster.
The kind of "niggling" cases I'm talking about are where there's a
fender-bender, usually at least arguably the fault of the insured, and the
other party takes three days off work, goes to a chiropractor recommended by
his or her lawyer 55 times (sometimes it's the chiropractor who recommends the
lawyer -- we called this "quack-to-quack"), then wants medical bills and lost
wages to the tune of $2200 or so.
If the insurance company wants to pay one of their lawyers $250 an hour to
spend two days trying the case, they have that right. It's not sending a
message to anybody but the taxpayers on the jury who swear they'll never get
insurance from that company and the poor shmuck who had the insurance and who
got sued because his insurer was too cheap to protect him and so he had to take
two days off work to come to court and sit by the insurance company lawyer,
looking like any judgment was coming out of his pocket, then had to testify
about how, yeah, he rear-ended this poor woman and didn't seem to be all that
concerned about how terribly injured she was, and who's had his credit ruined
by being sued.
If my insurance company did this to me, I'd kick somebody's ass.
walt
--
"Anything more than 500 yards from
the car just isn't photogenic." --
Edward Weston
-------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "Tom Scales" <tscales@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> From: "Walt Wayman" <hiwayman@xxxxxxx>
>
>
> > Yeah, maybe I do need to get off my high horse awhile.
> >
> > I'm sure part of my insurance company enmity
>
> Walt,
>
> I won't waste a thread with my stories, but I'm on the other side. I've
> worked in the insurance industry for 25 years. The number one cause, by far,
> of any increase in premiums is fraud, pure and simple. Until the beginning
> of this year, I was the COO of a large wholesale life insurance agency. My
> teams processed 17,000 applications a month. The answers and attempts to
> defraud were absolutely stunning.
>
> Clearly there are stupid participants on both sides wasting the courts time,
> but if the insurance companies didn't challenge many of them, they'd go
> under.
>
> Tom
>
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