Personal Injury Law

Insurance Companies Avoid Paying Claims

By Hurley, McKenna & Mertz

As a Chicago medical Malpractice lawyer I have long experienced insurance comapanies that do not pay their claims until they absolutely have to pay. Consider this:

"We've known the insurance company game for a long time. We just didn't have any proof. David Berardinelli does. As homeowners, we've known that insurers have raised premiums while cutting back on coverage. We watched the big three in Texas ? Allstate, State Farm and Farmers ? demand ever higher prices while dropping big chunks of customers, such as anyone in Harris County who has a wood-frame house. And we've suspected that all of this was done in the name of profit, because we can see that Allstate's net income, for example, has doubled in the past decade despite catastrophes such as hurricanes Katrina and Rita. In 2001, while Berardinelli, a Santa Fe attorney, was pressing a lawsuit against Allstate in New Mexico, he obtained what have become known as the McKinsey documents. He's one of the few people outside of the insurance industry who's seen them, and he took more than 400 pages of notes while they were in his possession. He made some of those notes available to me. The documents outline a strategy developed by the McKinsey & Co. consulting firm in the early 1990s that, according to Berardinelli, shows how Allstate has a carefully crafted plan to deny, evade and delay paying claims."

Loren Steffy, Houston Chronicle 10/1/07
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/biz/5174420.html

Full post as published by Chicago Medical Malpractice Lawyer Blog on October 16, 2007 (boomark / email).