Merlin Law Group attorney Ed Eshoo wrote another stellar post yesterday, The Impact of Coronavirus on the Replacement Condition, which incorporated a discussion of the Standard Fire Policy. Eshoo is a guru when it comes to standard fire policy law and all of us at Merlin Law Group are lucky to have him as a colleague.
In my new weekly Chip’s Tuesday at 2 Facebook Livestream, I showed viewers an old Rough Notes 1930 published book about “The Standard Fire Insurance Policy.” While I was teaching about actual cash value, I used it to demonstrate how the word “depreciation” was taken out of the newer standard versions. I have attached a small part of the book for you to read if you are interested in a little history about the origin and evolution of standard fire polices.
The book quoted at length a judicial opinion1 which recited the need for standard language to protect policyholders. Because many of us now believe the current policy forms are so long and so few people understand them, I think it is important to understand that American insurance companies and their executives have been doing this for over the last 150 years:
It is the state of things believed to exist, and not its real existence, that explains the legislation. The public belief, manifested in the annals of litigation and elsewhere, is too notorious and historic to require any specific attestation. The state of things believed to exist was this:
Some companies, chartered by the legislature as insurance companies, were organized for the purpose of providing one or two of their officers, at head-quarters, with lucrative employment,–large compensation for light work,–not for the purpose of insuring property; for the payment of expenses, not of losses. Whether a so-called insurance company was originally started for the purpose of insuring an easily earned income to one or two individuals, or whether it came to that end after a time, the ultimate evil was the same.
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The principal act of precaution was, to guard the company against liability for losses. Forms of applications and policies (like those used in this case), of a most complicated and elaborate structure, were prepared, and filled with covenants, exceptions, stipulations, provisos, rules, regulations, and conditions, rendering the policy void in a great number of contingencies. These provisions were of such bulk and character that they would not be understood by men in general, even if subjected to a careful and laborious study: by men in general, they were sure not to be studied at all. The study of them was rendered particularly unattractive, by a profuse intermixture of discourses on subjects in which a premium payer would have no interest. The compound, if read by him, would, unless he were an extraordinary man, be an inexplicable riddle, a mere flood of darkness and confusion. Some of the most material stipulations were concealed in a mass of rubbish, on the back side of the policy and the following page, where few would expect to find anything more than a dull appendix, and where scarcely any one would think of looking for information so important as that the company claimed a special exemption from the operation of the general law of the land relating to the only business in which the company professed to be engaged. As if it were feared that, notwithstanding these discouraging circumstances, some extremely eccentric person might attempt to examine and understand the meaning of the involved and intricate net in which he was to be entangled, it was printed in such small type, and in lines so long and so crowded, that the perusal of it was made physically difficult, painful, and injurious. Seldom has the art of typography been so successfully diverted from the diffusion of knowledge to the suppression of it. There was ground for the premium payer to argue that the print alone was evidence, competent to be submitted to a jury, of a fraudulent plot. It was not a little remarkable that a method of doing business not designed to impose upon, mislead, and deceive him by hiding the truth, practically concealing and misrepresenting the facts, and depriving him of all knowledge of what he was concerned to know, should happen to be so admirably adapted to that purpose. As a contrivance for keeping out of sight the dangers created by the agents of the nominal corporation, the system displayed a degree of cultivated ingenuity, which, if it had been exercised in any useful calling, would have merited the strongest commendation.
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An insurance company, by its agent, making assiduous application to an individual to make application to the company for a policy, was a sample of the crookedness characteristic of the whole business.
When a premium payer met with a loss, and called for the payment promised in the policy which he had accepted upon the most zealous solicitation, he was surprised to find that the voluminous, unread, and unexplained papers had been so printed at head-quarters, and so filled out by the agents of the company, as to show that he had applied for the policy. This, however, was the least of his surprises. He was informed that he had not only obtained the policy on his own application, but had obtained it by a series of representations (of which he had not the slightest conception), and had solemnly bound himself by a general assortment of covenants and warranties (of which he was unconscious), the number of which was equalled only by their variety, and the variety of which was equalled only by their supposed capacity to defeat every claim that could be made upon the company for the performance of its part of the contract. He was further informed that he had succeeded in his application by the falsehood and fraud of his representations,–the omission and misstatement of facts which he had expressly covenanted truthfully to disclose. Knowing well that the application was made to him, and that he had been cajoled by the skilful arts of an importunate agent into the acceptance of the policy and the signing of some paper or other, with as little understanding of their effect as if they had been printed in an unknown and untranslated tongue, he might well be astonished at the inverted application, and the strange multitude of fatal representations and ruinous covenants. But when he had time to realize his situation,–had heard the evidence of his having beset the invisible company, and obtained the policy by just such means as those by which he knew he had been induced to accept it, and listened to the proof of his obtaining it by treachery and guile, in pursuance of a premeditated scheme of fraud, with intent to swindle the company in regard to a lien for assessments, or some other matter of theoretical materiality, he was measurably prepared for the next regular charge of having burned his own property.
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The increasing number of stipulations and covenants, secreted in the usual manner, not being understood by the premium payer until his property was burned, people were as easily beguiled into one edition as another, until at last they were made to formally contract with a phantom that carried on business to the limited extent of absorbing cash received by certain persons who were not its agents.When it was believed that things had come to this pass, the legislature thought it time to regulate the business in such a manner that it should have some title to the name of insurance, and some appearance of fair dealing; and the act of 1855 was passed for that purpose.
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[T]he manner in which innocent and deluded persons were overwhelmed by an array of their theoretical misrepresentations and constructive frauds, and other misfortunes incident to the system, were believed to constitute a crying evil, and a mischief of great magnitude….When the premium payer complained that he had been defrauded, it was not, in the opinion of the legislature, a sufficient answer to say that, if he had been wise enough, taken time enough, had good eyes enough, and been reckless enough in the use of them to read the mass of fine print, and had been scholar, business man, and lawyer enough to understand its full force and effect, he would have been alarmed, and would not have been decoyed into the trap that was set for him. Men have a right to be dealt with with some regard for the state of mind and body, of knowledge and business, in which they are known actually to exist. Whether they ought to be what they are, or not, the fact is, that, in the present condition of society, men in general cannot read and understand these insurance documents.
Similarly, I am quite certain that many business owners currently shut down by the coronavirus do not understand why they have Civil Authority benefits being withheld except that the insurance industry is up its “evil” of fine line language preventing payment. The same sentiment is felt with the new insurance executives allowing gaps in coverage to be written into virtually every residential and commercial property insurance policy. They will be calling for reform because they are furious with a licensed industry that seems to be failing customers in their time of need with denials.
Perhaps the insurance industry should stop making goofy ads and warn what their policies do not pay before the losses happen. Perhaps they should better explain why their products work the way they do and stop competing on hidden coverage gaps cleverly written into language most would not expect because all they hear is monetary savings on cheap insurance. Insurance companies are licensed and we can make these solicitations and practices illegal if our legislators care more for their electorate than money from the insurance lobbyists.
Thought For The Day
Criticism in good faith is good. When it’s targeted solely to destruction, I’m not interested.
—Andrea Bocelli
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1 De Lancey v. Rockingham Farmers Mut. Fire Ins. Co., 52 N.H. 581 (1873).
