A very fine insurance defense attorney, Brian Hunter, made a comment to yesterday’s post, Do Insurance Companies Overpay Claims? with the following observation:

"Second, not only can claims be overpaid, they can be underpaid…."

Assuming this is true, and it probably is based on the law of averages, how can we have any meaningful data? What is the standard against which a claim is judged over- or underpaid? Is it the proof of loss, or the public adjuster’s estimate, or the appraisal award, or something else? Even if we use the most presumably objective of these, i.e., an appraisal umpire’s award, as a standard, then a good many claims I have seen resolved in that manner have been simultaneously underpaid by insurers and grossly inflated by the insured and/or public adjuster.

Of course, in most cases, an appraisal award is a legal fiction that may or may not bear a rational relationship to the amount necessary to repair the property; but it is certainly and merely an estimate. Frequently, the umpire’s award is an average of two competing estimates. Regrettably, few court-appointed umpires have any specialized training in the construction fields, and many have never written an estimate of their own nor done any kind of construction work. Maybe a better standard is needed.

What we do not have is reliable data in Florida during the past several years comparing claim payments with amounts spent by policyholders to actually accomplish like kind and quality repairs. (If I am wrong, I would love to see a source.) Changing the law to require insurers to pay actual expenditures, and not mere estimates of replacement cost (some honest, some not, all estimates nevertheless), would bring greater certainty to all the parties, I think. Yet this is opposed by the same folks, i.e. public adjusters, bemoaning the lack of accuracy in claim adjustment.

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