Following is yet another clip from Gene Taylor’s town hall meeting which touches on the heart of why so many people on the Mississippi Gulf Coast feel as though they have been swindled by their insurer: The Anti Concurrent Clause. Pictured in this New York Times story from 2006 that explains the concept is Marilyn Haverty, a lady I’ve known since I was a child growing up in Waveland with her children back in the 70’s and 80’s. Miss Marilyn and people like her are the reason this blog exists.
There’s no question that the anti-concurrent clause is bad for policyholders,’’ said Adam F. Scales, an associate professor who teaches insurance law at the Washington and Lee University School of Law, in Lexington, Va. “It’s not fair because it defeats policyholders’ reasonable expectations.’
Robert Hunter, former Texas Insurance Commissioner and Director with the Consumer Federation of America contends consumers do not understand such clauses buried in the fine print of their policies. George Dale seemed to agree in an interview he gave the Sun Herald that ran back in March 2006, when he claimed ignorance that insurers would use the clause to deny coverage: (The Sun Herald link is long gone but thanks to Anita over at the Did we survive Katrina or Not? blog we have this quote from the story.)
Q: So, you might not have realized how this was going to be interpreted when it was approved?
A: Oh, I’m admitting that with just the volume of the number of type policies – and there are hundreds of them in the course of a year that comes through my rating division – there may be other things that are in policies that would have gotten approved by my department by accident.That’s just the volume of the business that they do. Let’s hope it’s a minimal number of things that were approved.
I would submit that if this nation’s *longest serving insurance commissioner and his staff of lawyers had little clue to the meaning of this language then consumers had no chance of understanding the language. In fact most down here feel such language is a scam as the reason they bought the policy in the first place was to cover the one event insurers now claim it didn’t cover, a Hurricane.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyhHP6Emgfk]
* – Mr. Dale was soundly beat in the party primary in August 2007 thus ending his term of service to the insurance industry.
sop