Just a Footnote

We see a house burning and we think, "I hope they have insurance". Have a car minor car accident and you think about insurance. Have a major accident and you think about car and health insurance. And maybe disability insurance. Insurance, in one way or another, touches everything we do.

Advertising for the industry portrays it as caring and compassionate, the "good hands people" and your "good neighbor". Unfortunately, this image is frequently so distant from reality that the Enterprise would have to travel at Warp Factor Six for weeks to bridge the gap.

The Elder Zookeeper is, among other things, a lawyer, licensed (as the saying goes) to appear before all the courts of California. He has recently been involved in an effort to get those courts to recognize a tool provided by the Legislature to help control abuse by insurance companies. The experience has been an eyeopener for the E.Z. who was no fan of insurance companies when he started.

The chief defendant in this case (who so far has been absolutely kicking our butts) is a company called Unum-Provident. The California Insurance Commissioner recently described them as an "outlaw company". Otherwise, Unum is a gigantic national insurance company.

We are now seeking to have the California Supreme Court review the disasterously ill-conceived opinions of the lower courts. What follows is one footnote from a letter urging that review. The footnote contains the partial record of one insurance company. Read and be educated.

See, e.g., Hedley-Whyte v. Unum Life Ins. Co. of America, No. Civ. A. 94-11731-GAO, 1996 WL 208492, at *3 (D. Mass. Mar. 6, 1996) (O’Toole, J.) (noting that attorney’s fees were particularly appropriate because Unum Life’s construction of its policy was so clearly at odds with its plain language); Keller v. Unum Life Ins. Co. of America, No. 90 Civ. 5718 (VLB), 1992 WL 346343, at *2 (S.D.N.Y. Sept. 30, 1992) (describing Unum’s behavior as “culpably abusive”).
Numerous courts have reversed these companies’ denials of benefits under a de novo standard, many times criticizing their practices. See Curtin v. Unum Life Ins. Co. of America, 298 F. Supp. 2d 149, 159 (D. Me. 2004) (“[T]his Court finds that Defendants exhibited a low level of care to avoid improper denial of claims at great human expense.”); Locher v. Unum Life Ins. Co. of America, No. 96 Civ. 3828(LTS)(HPB), 2002 WL 362769, at *9-10 (S.D.N.Y. Mar. 7, 2002) (overturning Unum’s denial of benefits, despite Unum’s argument that the claimant was not disabled because she worked a full day the day she left her job); Barone v. Unum Life Ins. Co. of America, 186 F. Supp. 2d 777, 787 (E.D. Mich. 2002); Wilkes v. Unum Life Ins. Co. of America, No. 01-C-182-C, 2002 WL 926279, at *10 (W.D. Wis. Jan. 29, 2002) (finding “that the defendant’s position was not substantially justified or taken in good faith”); Hall v. Unum Life Ins. Co. of America, No. 97-CV-1828, 1999 WL 33485551, at *8 (D. Colo. Nov. 1, 1999) vacated in part on other grounds, 300 F.3d 1197 (10th Cir. 2002); Leva v. First Unum Ins. Co., No. 96 CIV 8590(DC), 1999 WL 294802, at *1-2 (S.D.N.Y. May 11, 1999) (noting that “Unum is ‘culpable’ in the sense that it did not consider [the plaintiff’s] application with the care that she deserved,” and that the only medical review of the claim was done by a registered nurse, who happened to be the claims examiner’s mother); Jones v. Unum Life Ins. Co. of America, No. 99-7173, 1998 WL 778366, at *6 (S.D.N.Y. Nov. 6, 1998), vacated in part on other grounds, 223 F.3d 130 (2d Cir. 2000); Ragsdale v. Unum Life Ins. Co. of America, 999 F. Supp. 1016, 1026 (N.D. Ohio 1998); Dishman v. Unum Life Ins. Co. of America, No. 96-0015-JSL, 1997 WL 906146, at *11-13 (C.D. Cal. May 9, 1997) (noting that the court would have reached the same decision under an arbitrary and capricious standard, and describing Unum Life’s “unscrupulous conduct” in engaging in “bad faith denial of large claims as a strategy for settling them for substantially less than the amount owed”); Hamner v. Unum Life Ins. Co. of America, No. C 96-1973 TEH, 1997 WL 257515, at *6; (N.D. Cal. May 6, 1997); Mays v. Unum Life Ins. Co. of America, No. 95 C 1168, 1995 WL 631807, at *9 (N.D. Ill. Oct. 24, 1995); Findings of fact and law in: e.g.: Hangarter v. Paul Revere Life Ins. Co. 236 F.Supp.2d 1069, 1107 (N.D.Cal., 2002); Galanty v Paul Revere 23 Cal.4th 368, 388 [1 P.3d 658, 672-672, 97 Cal.Rptr.2d 67,82] (2000); Grosz-Salomon v. Paul Revere Life (2001, 9th Cir.) 237 F.3d 1154, 1157; Dishman v. UNUM Life Ins. Co. of America, 269 F.3d 974, 986-987 (9th Cir. 2001); Dym v. Provident Life and Acc. Ins. Co., 19 F. Supp.2d 1147 (S.D. Cal. 1998); Russell v. Paul Revere Life Ins. Co., 148 F.Supp.2d 392 (D.C. Del. 2001)

Oh, yeah. Stay Naked.
jd