Douglas Quinn is the President of the American Policyholder Association (APA.). He was in Orlando last Saturday afternoon. The meeting was somewhat impromptu and had a number of leaders from the National Association of Public Insurance Adjusters.
Quinn remarked about “the why” he is doing work through the American Policyholder Association. He wants to stop the destruction of lives to people who are insurance consumers who have been subject to insurance company fraud. When insurance company consultants are intentionally making up reports and opinions to support outcome oriented investigations, those vendors are destroying families and business owners that are depending on the insurance company’s good faith during an investigation and evaluation of what is owed.
His compassionate remarks resonated with me. All too often I find that these consultants are able to look away from the human destruction they are causing, as if the policyholders are nothing but a number and their job is to help the insurance company’s bottom line.
I shared Quinn’s remarks with Denver Merlin Law Group attorney Jon Bukowski. Jon reached over to a file and showed me a picture of air conditioning units with hail punctures and damage which were never reported as damaged by the insurance company consultant. Jon said that Quinn is correct—some insurance consultants simply do not care about the damage they inflict from their false reports because they view their job as helping the insurer reduce the claim.
At our Merlin Law Group holiday party in Denver, (a group photo is shown above), I brought up Quinn’s comments again. This time I said that I bet a number of insurance company executives and insurance company ethics audit committees would be upset to learn that some of their vendors act this way. Interestingly, when reading through the APA website I came across an APA article which stated:
Some senior executives of major insurers clearly want to expose vendors that defraud policyholders in their name. Insurers may have robust internal checks and balances to police wrongful actions. But insurers increasingly rely on third-party administrator (TPA) firms today. External adjusting and engineering firms thus can create a large portion of damage and claim reports.
I called and spoke with Douglas Quinn yesterday. He told me that he is passionately trying to explain that when insurance vendors write false reports, these acts result in bankruptcies, suicides, increase in domestic violence, and substance abuse as people try to cope with wrongfully being subject to claim denial and underpayment.
I wish Douglas Quinn and his wife Heather all the success in the world making this problem transparent and eliminated. Making insurance fraud against the insurance companies’ own clients as a topic of conversation is important. Getting prosecutors to clean up this type of insurance fraud committed against policyholders, and often the contractors selected by policyholders to repair the damage, is just as important as fraud committed against insurance companies.
Thought For The Day
Remember that all financial markets are filled with good but not necessarily innocent people looking after their own self-interests before they look after yours.
—Robert Kiyosaki
