Jay M. Feinman > Quotes

“The law is so complex and voluminous
that no one, not even the most knowledgeable lawyer, can understand it
all. Moreover, lawyers and legal scholars have not gone out of their way
to make the law accessible to the ordinary person. Just the opposite: Legal
professionals, like the priests of some obscure religion, too often try to
keep the law mysterious and inaccessible.”
― Jay Feinman

“law lives in conduct, not on the printed page; it exists in the interactions of judges, lawyers, and ordinary citizens.”
― Jay M. Feinman, Law 101: Everything You Need to Know About American Law

“Insurance works when the insurance company honors a simple
promise: When a policyholder files a claim, the company will pay what it
owes, no more but no less, and will do so promptly and fairly. Insurance
doesn’t work when the company breaks its promise in order to increase its
profits.Insurance doesn’t work when companies delay, deny, defend. When they
delay payment of claims to wear down claimants and to increase their
investment income, flat-out deny some valid claims in whole or part, and
defend against valid claims in litigation to back up the delays and denials,
they break their basic promise.”
― Jay M. Feinman, Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It

“For Farmers’ ACME, as for Allstate’s CCPR and State Farm’s ACE, the McKinsey principles applied. The claims process would be radically altered. Traditionally companies pay what they should pay, with “should” defined by what the policyholder was owed. Transforming claims into a profit center would require focusing on leakage, or paying more than should be paid, where “should” was measured by the goal of reducing costs and increasing profits.”
― Jay M. Feinman, Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It

“State Farm tried to move Katrina lawsuits out of southern Mississippi, presenting as evidence a survey showing that forty-nine percent of people in southern Mississippi “believe that insurance executives are on the same level as child molesters.”[”
― Jay M. Feinman, Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It

“When the insured submits a claim, the insurance company has an incentive to delay, diminish, or deny the claim, for the simple reason that it gets to keep money unless and until it has to pay the insured. Therefore, the company is subject to moral hazard, too.”
― Jay M. Feinman, Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It

“Lawyers retained by insurance companies are just another part of the claims processing system, and they are, for the companies, just another outside vendor of services, like the companies that furnish janitorial services or office supplies. As such, they are subject to cost control systems, mostly put into place as part of the redesign of claims processing.”
― Jay M. Feinman, Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It

“The company’s obligation is even greater than being an independent adjudicator; the company has an affirmative obligation to help the insured with its claim.”
― Jay M. Feinman, Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It

“Zilisch then brought a suit against State Farm for bad faith in processing her claim, and the jury awarded her $460,000 in compensatory damages and $540,000 in punitive damages.”
― Jay M. Feinman, Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It

“The main course: To violate the fundamental principle of claims handling by redefining the claims process as a profit center.”
― Jay M. Feinman, Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It

“Law is not in the law books. Books are one of the first things that come to mind when we think about law: fat texts almost too heavy to lift; dust-covered, leather-bound tomes of precedents; law libraries filled with rows and rows of statutes and judicial opinions. While books tell us a lot about the law, they are not the law. Instead, law lives in conduct, not on the printed page; it exists in the interactions of judges, lawyers, and ordinary citizens. Think, for example, about one of the laws we most commonly encounter: the speed limit. What is the legal speed limit on most interstate highways? Someone who looked only in the law books might think the answer is 65 mph, but we know better. If you drive at 65 mph on the New Jersey Turnpike, be prepared to have a truck bearing down on you, flashing its lights to get you to pull into the slow lane. The speed limit according to drivers’ conduct is considerably higher than 65. And legal officials act the same way. The police allow drivers a cushion and never give a speeding ticket to someone who is going 66. If they did, the judges would laugh them out of traffic court. As a practical matter, the court doesn’t want to waste its time with someone who violated the speed limit by 1 mph, and as a matter of law, the police radar may not be accurate enough to draw that fine a line anyway. So what is the law on how fast you can drive? Something different than the books say.”
― Jay M. Feinman, Law 101: Everything You Need to Know About American Law

“the goal of defending a claim is not necessarily to win the particular case but to maximize the company’s profits.”
― Jay M. Feinman, Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It

“My vast experience in evaluating claims was replaced by values generated by a computer. More often than not, these values were not representative of what I had experienced as fair and reasonable.”[5] Many adjusters adapted to the new system and kept their jobs, or were replaced by claims representatives—the customer-friendly term now preferred by the industry—who were trained in the new normal.”
― Jay M. Feinman, Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It

“Delay, deny, defend is so frequent that it is even possible for a policyholder to buy insurance against the risk that the insurance company will deny a claim.”
― Jay M. Feinman, Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It

“For critics of the industry, the McKinsey documents are the smoking gun that describes in detail how the claims process shifted from customer service to profit center.”
― Jay M. Feinman, Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It

“The real money in claims, though is in the amount paid out in claims and not in the expenses.”
― Jay M. Feinman, Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It

“loss and loss adjustment expense ratio.”
― Jay M. Feinman, Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It

“the attorney will take 25-40 percent of whatever the claimant receives from the insurance company. The adjuster is not advised to tell the claimant that the attorney will not just take part of the recovery but will earn it, because claimants who are represented by an attorney receive two to five times more money from the company.”
― Jay M. Feinman, Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It

“Because litigation often drags on, it can take years for this information to come to light, and when it does, insurance companies disingenuously attack it as outdated.”
― Jay M. Feinman, Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It

“The point of view in this book is pro-consumer, but it is not anti-insurance.”
― Jay M. Feinman, Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It

“The three Ds—delay, deny, defend—are at the heart of how insurance companies maximize their profits at the expense of their customers.”
― Jay M. Feinman, Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It

“The universally understood elements of risk are uncertainty and loss—”
― Jay M. Feinman, Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It

“Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there,” with the clever jingle written in 1971 by a then little-known songwriter named Barry Manilow.”
― Jay M. Feinman, Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It