Tell anyone in Miami that health care insurance is expensive and he or she will respond “Tell me something I don’t know.” That’s why it is extremely frustrating for people when they experience problems with their insurance, like a denied claim. Understandably, they feel they have been paying a lot for this protection and do not understand why it is not there for them when they need it.
Yesterday we discussed legislation involving auto insurance reform. Some lawmakers want to reform Florida’s no-fault auto insurance law in order to protect insurance companies from bad faith insurance litigation. There is still much debate on whether reform is needed and what form any legislation should take. It is also unclear whether any of the proposed bills would eliminate the need for auto insurance litigation, which is necessary for many policyholders to enforce their rights against unscrupulous insurance companies seeking to cut costs.
In our last post we discussed legislation tackling bad faith insurance litigation reform. Bad faith insurance litigation is not the only insurance topic to make it into this legislative session. The state insurance commissioner Kevin McCarty believes that this will be the year that lawmakers finally make reforms to Florida’s no-fault auto insurance law.
Florida is one of seven states to sign a settlement with Prudential Financial in a death benefits dispute. The multi-state investigation into the insurance industry’s treatment of unpaid life insurance benefits began last May. The settlement requires Prudential, the second-largest life insurer in the country, to institute procedural changes and to pay $17 million to the states to fund compliance monitoring.
Insurance companies and business interests have suffered a blow early on in Florida’s legislative session. The House Civil Justice Committee voted recently to kill a bill that would have changed the rules for bad faith insurance litigation.
“Katrina’s coming,” a Florida state congressman told his colleagues recently. He was urging them to vote for legislation that would allow alternative hurricane insurance to what is provided by the state-backed Citizens Property Insurance Co. The bill passed 66-48 and will go to the state Senate next.
Every so often, there is a news story about a wealthy woman who has left her multimillion dollar mansion to her cat. Or, there’s some guy working out a divorce who insists that he needs $15,000 a week to let his dogs live in the style to which they’ve become accustomed. At times those stories will include little snippets about insurance, too.
We are wrapping up our discussion of homeowners insurance and lenders’ foreclosure practices. Homeowners in Florida have fallen victim to questionable foreclosure practices, and the media has covered those at length. What distressed homeowners may not realize is that their lenders may also have foisted a homeowners insurance policy on them that was a little questionable, too.
We are talking about the foreclosure crisis and homeowners insurance. Florida has felt the pain of both, but some homeowners may have felt the pain of the two in combination. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo are now the targets of an investigation into force-placed homeowners insurance policies.
The foreclosure crisis hit Florida pretty hard, and the state has seen its fair share of news stories about banks’ sloppy documentation practices and robo-signing scandals. Regulators, consumer advocates and consumers themselves have taken mortgage companies to task for predatory lending, too. One state is pursuing banks for yet another questionable practice, this one involving homeowners insurance.
