Insurance is a picky business. Insurers write policies that look generous but are, in fact, fairly narrow. For example, an insurer or agent may use the term “all peril” when referring to a homeowners policy. The average person would understand that to mean all perils: hail, famine, war, lightning, a terrorist attack and so forth. Any damage to your home caused by anything under the sun will be covered.
An insurance company has prevailed in an unusual dispute with a Florida condominium owner. The woman filed a claim with State Farm Florida Insurance Co. after an unpleasant incident in the unit above hers. Her upstairs neighbor died, and the body was not discovered for a couple of weeks. By that time, the body had decomposed to the point that the abdomen had ruptured, allowing bodily fluids to escape.
We cannot say it often enough: Read your insurance policies carefully. If you have a claim, follow the instructions laid out in the policy for filing that claim. And when you purchase a policy, carefully go through what it covers and what it does not cover.
The insurance claim form for the Titanic is going up for auction in the next week or so. It’s an interesting document, and not just for insurance types. The four pages completed by Second Officer Charles Lightoller offer a surprisingly clinical description of the disaster. Lightoller may have had a reason for his ho-hum tone, or he may have simply had a “Just the facts, ma’am” moment.
This week marks the 102nd anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. We wrote about some of the insurance issues a couple of years ago, when the disaster’s centennial prompted so much coverage. (See our April 2012, archive.) An auction house in England announced recently that it will be selling the original insurance claim form for Titanic at auction later in April. They expect to get about $20,000 for it.
We are still talking about litigation costs at Citizens Property Insurance Corp. The state-run insurance company is paying more than $2 million every month to defend itself in policyholder lawsuits, according to research conducted by a state legislator. The lawsuits are over claim denials, and critics are wondering why Citizens is choosing to litigate when paying the claims could cost less.
Depopulation is the wave of the present at Florida’s Citizens Property Insurance Corp. Earlier this year, the state’s insurer of last resort announced that it had shed enough policies to bring the total number of policyholders below the 1 million mark. Citizens hasn’t seen numbers like this since 2006, according to Insurance Journal.
We usually talk about consumers’ issues with insurance companies. Flood insurance, homeowner insurance, auto insurance and life insurance — these are topics that focus on Florida residents and their families. In this post, though, we have something for businesses: the fourth-quarter results of Towers Watson’s Commercial Lines Insurance Pricing Survey.
We are continuing our discussion of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision in a class action case against one of the manufacturers of Chinese drywall. The court has ordered that the company pay damages to the homeowners who were the named plaintiffs in the class action. The plaintiffs are not from Florida, but the decision clears the way for Florida homeowners to pursue the manufacturer for damages as well.
The Chinese drywall debacle should be well behind us, but homeowners in Florida and a couple of other states are still waiting for their day in court. Their wait should not last much longer, though, now that the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the second manufacturer of the defective drywall cannot remove the litigation to China and must pay damages to a handful of plaintiffs.
