April 30, 2008
Good article today on MSN about claims that boost your insurance rates.
I would agree the two homeowner claims that get the most attention from an insurance company are:
- Dog bites
- Water damage
I would add number three: Fire claims.
With all issues, insurers are trying to anticipate future problems. Did you address what caused the claim to begin with? Were the repairs the last insurance company made done properly?
A few other points to discuss: the article discusses CLUE and includes a link titled “Insurers keep a secret history of your home“
How ominous, the Secret History. What they fail to mention is how this evil secret history was set up for insurance companies to protect themselves from lying applicants.
This may come as a shock to people outside the insurance biz, but people do tell lies to get lower insurance premiums.
Fiona McCaul, the corporate-communications manager of ChoicePoint, is quoted about insurers adding erroneous claims to CLUE, know in the business as “zero-dollar claims”. She says:
“A claim is loaded into the database when the loss occurs and is accessible when a CLUE report is requested by the carrier at the time of application for insurance,” she says. “For several years we have cautioned insurance carriers not to enter inquiries into the CLUE database — only actual claims.”
What Ms. McCaul doesn’t point out is ChoicePoint’s cryptic legal requirements for insurers and how most insurers would rather error on the reporting side than be accused (or sued) by ChoicePoint for failing to report claims data.
Say someone calls in to report a fender bender, the damage comes to $350 and the person’s deductible is $500. If the insurer doesn’t pay out any money, is it a claim? Debate among yourselves.
