Some may recall that the Center for Justice & Democracy's project, Americans for Insurance Reform (AIR), set up a toll-free insurance hotline on September 12, 2005 – days after Hurricane Katrina - to monitor a huge number of hurricane-related insurance complaints. Some of these cases ended up in an AIR report called The Insurance Industry’s Troubling Response To Hurricane Katrina, detailing “a significant pattern of callousness, unfairness, and generally inept performance by many companies. In some cases, insurers’ conduct worsened the suffering of policyholders, many of whom were left hungry and homeless by the hurricane.”
Well, the stories never got much better and it is now particularly painful to see new stories like these.
Like, in an absurdly unfair turn of events, courageous insurance-industry whistleblowers Cori and Kerri Rigsby, former Katrina insurance adjusters, were told they must page $65,000 to their former employer, E.A. Renfroe, which had sued them after their allegations of widespread fraud went public. One ABC News 20/20 segment “detailed the Rigsbys' claims that State Farm cheated many Mississippi policyholders whose homes were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.” These women are heroes.
And here’s another. Remember that horrible class action bill that Congress passed in 2005? (Some background about class actions here.) Well, now this law is haunting - and hurting - Katrina victims.
Specifically, an anti-trust case against major insurance companies for price-fixing and low-balling hurricane Katrina and Rita claims, which was originally brought in state court because state laws were at issue, was thrown into federal court by the insurance companies - and apparently will now stay there thanks to the dumb federal class action law.
Will Gulf Coast policyholders ever get a break here?
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