[WhenItWasAHobby]

Originally Posted by Kenny Cole

Uh, yes. I realize that this question was directed to Adam, but I have two of those cases right now. I'm going to trial in one of them in a couple of months. The one I'm going to trial on was an accidental death policy (never get one, they do their utmost to cover nothing) where an 83 year old woman choked on food at a nursing home, aspirated it, and died within a 12 hours of aspiration pneumonitis -- an acute lung infection you can get when you suck food into your lungs. According to them, it wasn't accidental although they really can't explain why that isn't an accident. I mean, she obviously didn't intend to suck food down the wrong pipe and kill herself.

In the second one, the carrier paid the wrong beneficiary after receiving notice that he was the wrong beneficiary. Best as I can tell, the defense is that since they paid the policy benefits, albeit to a person they know wasn't the person designated to get them, they're off the hook. So the answer is yes, they will sometimes do that.

I see this thread has morphed into "bad lawyers" and "bad insurance companies" complaints and I can say from my personal experience the two topics are inseparable. I talked to several attorneys about three years ago who said in confidence that in their opinion, "the insurance industry is now the new organized crime of the 21st century". The planned and calculated bad faith tactics of many of the major insurance carriers is well documented and a great deal of it has to do with lawyers being complicit participants in attempting or successfully fleecing policyholders out of money clearly owed to them.