I was sent this information and it looks EXACTLY like the behaviour of STATE INSURANCE in dealing with our claim! Delay, Deny, Defend is the title of a book by Jay FEINMAN in the US about the policy in Insurance companies trying to increase their profits. It is fascinating, disgusting and highly damaging to the Insurance industries image in the public’s eyes.

State Insurance use this policy to avoid paying claims!

An excerpt from the book follows:-

Insurance is the great protector of the standard of living of the American middle class. A good job provides the means to acquire a home, a car, a college education for the children, and a comfortable retirement, and insurance secures those things against the uncertainties of life. Houses will burn, but homeowners insurance furnishes funds to rebuild. Cars will crash, but auto insurance pays medical bills and repair costs and guards against potentially massive liability to other people who are injured. Illness, injury, and death will occur, but health insurance, disability insurance, and life insurance remove the burden of cost and replace the lost earnings of the breadwinner.

Insurance has come a long way in five thousand years, from the time when Babylonian merchants found investors who agreed to accept the risk of cargo lost at sea in return for a payment, a transaction that would develop into marine insurance. Today insurance in the United States is a trillion-dollar industry, with 2,700 property/casualty insurance companies collecting $440 billion in premiums and paying $250 billion in claims each year. (Property/casualty insurance mostly protects against property damage and liability to others; “personal lines property/casualty” is largely auto and homeowners insurance, the subjects of this book.) State Farm, the industry’s giant, has forty-two million policies in force and processes over twelve million claims each year.

Insurance is the great protector of the standard of living of the American middle class, but only when it works. Purchasing an insurance policy is less like buying a product and more like receiving a promise. In return for the policyholder’s payment of a premium, the insurance company promises to accept the risks of financial loss that the policyholder otherwise could not bear. As a formal matter the promise to indemnify the insured against loss is embodied in the policy document, often fifty pages of eight-point type that is seldom read and less often understood, but the real promise is to provide security against loss. Long before the GEICO gecko promised to save you 15 percent or more on car insurance, the iconic slogans of insurance company advertising expressed that real promise: “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.” “You’re in good hands with Allstate.”

Insurance doesn’t work when the insurance company fails to honor the terms of the policy and its promise of security through the strategy that has become known as “delay, deny, defend.” The company delays payment of a claim, denies all or part of a valid claim, or aggressively defends litigation the policyholder is forced to bring to get what he is rightfully owed. When insurance doesn’t work, the consequences are more severe than when any other kind of company fails to keep its promise. If a homeowner hires someone to paint his house and the painter never shows up, the homeowner can take his money and hire someone else. If the insurance company refuses to pay a claim, it is too late to go elsewhere for another policy; no company will write a policy that will pay for fire damage that has already occurred.

Delay, deny, defend violates the rules for handling claims that are recognized by every company, taught to adjusters, and embodied in law. Within the vast bureaucracy of insurance companies, actuaries assess risks, underwriters price policies and evaluate prospective policyholders, and agents market policies. The claims department’s only job is to pay what is owed, no more but no less. A classic text used to train adjusters, James Markham’s The Claims Environment, states the principle: “The essential function of a claim department is to fulfill the insurance company’s promise, as set forth in the insurance policy. . . . The claim function should ensure the prompt, fair, and efficient delivery of this promise.”

Beginning in the 1990s, many major insurance companies reconsidered this understanding of the claims process. The insight was simple. An insurance company’s greatest expense is what it pays out in claims. If it pays out less in claims, it keeps more in profits. Therefore, the claims department became a profit center rather than the place that kept the company’s promise.

A major step in this shift occurred when Allstate and other companies hired the megaconsulting firm McKinsey & Company to develop new strategies for handling claims. McKinsey saw claims as a “zero-sum game,” with the policyholder and the company competing for the same dollars. No longer would each claim be treated on its merits. Instead, computer systems would be put in place to set the amounts policyholders would be offered, claimants would be deterred from hiring lawyers to help with their claims, and settlements would be offered on a take-it-or- litigate basis. If Allstate moved from “Good Hands” to “Boxing Gloves,” as McKinsey described it, policyholders would either take a lowball offer from the good hands people or face the boxing gloves of extended litigation.

How widespread is delay, deny, defend? How often is it that insurance doesn’t work? There are two answers: too widespread and too often, and no one knows.

The story of delay, deny, defend is easy to understand but hard to discover and document. It is easy to understand that insurance companies make more money when they pay less out in claims, and as with other industries, from chain restaurants to Internet sales, they have become more systematic about the ways in which they make money in recent decades. But while insurance companies like to shape the public’s perception of them through advertising, they are notoriously unwilling to disclose information about their internal workings, especially information that shows they do not always deliver on their promises. Companies spend a great deal of money on advertising that they will fulfill their promise to provide security for their policyholders, but they also spend a great deal of money on lawyers to mask the times when that security fails.

(Full except here for download in PDF format!)

It all sounds so familiar, STATE INSURANCE clearly use this policy or an adaption of it, there is no other explanation of the incredible delays that have taken place in our case! Be warned when insuring with STATE INSURANCE, it is their apparent company policy NOT TO PAY some claims!

Now why would they take this policy, as usual the reason is MONEY! Profit for the shareholders, more salaries for the Loss Adjusters and Investigators. Watch this video of Jay Feinman talking about Delay, Deny, Defend and the advantages to the Insurance company.

Clearly STATE INSURANCE don’t see customers as important, their suffering in conditions like ours is ignored compared to PROFIT!