“Policyholders should be aware that Mississippi law provides that insureds have an affirmative duty to read a contract of insurance and are bound by the contents thereof”, according to the Mississippi Insurance Department’s (MID) Policyholder’s Bill of Rights (PBOR).
Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of Law defines affirmative duty as, “involving or requiring the application of effort”. In other words, what the law actually requires is that insureds make an effort to read their insurance contract. What a relief!
An important study, by Forrest E.Harding in the Journal of Risk and Insurance in 1967, found that a specimen auto policy was substantially more difficult to read than Albert Einstein’s The Meaning of Relativity. In response to urging by consumer groups, Plain English advocates, and regulators, insurance companies began to revise and simplify their contracts as far back as the 1970s—some voluntarily, some in response to state laws.
David Rossmiller, quoted above, took a look at policy language in Plainly Ambiguous: Have Plain English Laws Made Insurance Policies Less Ambiguous? (Oregon Association of Defense Counsel, Spring 2008):
…there is little evidence that insurance consumers can better understand policies now than they could at the time of the Harding study, Continue reading “Reading and Rights – literacy and the “affirmative duty to read a contract of insurance””