Anybody facing the unfortunate circumstance of having to file a claim with their insurance company whether it is an automobile accident, fire, water, hurricane or any other type of catastrophic loss should read Delay, Deny, Defend.
The book is an eye opener for policy holders who are having difficulty navigating the process of filing a claim for losses to their home.
Simply put, insurance is great, but only if it works and there is a case to be made that the insurance landscape in America often doesn’t work.
When home owners faithfully pay their premiums month after month while being reminded by their insurance company how much “peace of mind” they have, they can be left disillusioned when their “promise of security” isn’t what they thought it would be.
It can be very disheartening when a homeowner has to file a claim and the check they receive is a far cry from covering the loss to their home. It becomes more unsettling when it’s apparent they will have to come out of pocket, sometimes to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars or more just to get their homes back to the shape it was, even though returning their home to pre loss condition is guaranteed by their policy.
This is because of a dramatic shift in the insurance industry’s business model which has become known as Delay, Deny, Defend which is the title of a book by Jay M. Feinman.
It’s a three step strategy used by insurance companies where they delay payment of a claim, deny all or part of a claim, or if that doesn’t work they to force the homeowner to go to litigation just to receive what they rightfully owed.
The new shift in policy is described by Feinman in great detail but a quick summary is this strategy came about when one of the biggest national insurance companies hired a consulting firm to reevaluate the firms handling of the claims payout process.
The outcome resulted in an policy where the company’s adjusters started paying less in claims to generate more profit. The less they paid the homeowner on their claims, the more profit their department reported to the higher ups. The old policy of let’s take care of the homeowners when they were facing the misfortune of a catastrophic loss turned into lets take care of the company’s bottom line.