NYT, Dec. 30, 2020
Black Homeowners Struggle to Get Insurers to Pay Claims
By Emily Flitter
When a pipe burst and flooded her home in 2018, Deonne Burgess knew the
cleanup would be messy. What she didn’t expect was the scrutiny from
State Farm, her home insurance provider.
A claims adjuster from State Farm sought to strike as many items as
possible off a list of repairs from her home in Inglewood, a
predominantly Black neighborhood in Los Angeles, Ms. Burgess said. The
adjuster argued that State Farm should not have to pay to replace a door
that was so damaged by the flooding that it no longer closed.
Ms. Burgess, the global payroll director of the Wonderful Company, which
makes packaged foods like pomegranate juice and pistachio nuts, began to
think that she was being treated with extra suspicion because she is
Black. She told State Farm it was unlikely that policyholders in a white
neighborhood would receive the same treatment.
Ms. Burgess’s assertions “are without merit,” said Roszell Gadson, a
State Farm spokesman. “State Farm is committed to a diverse and
inclusive environment, where all customers are treated with fairness,
respect and dignity.”
Ms. Burgess had no way of proving that her experiences with the State
Farm adjuster amounted to racism. After all, the same insurer paid out
an auto insurance claim for her BMW 5 Series sedan, which was also
ruined by the flood; a different set of people handled it, and there was
not much to argue about. But Mark Young, the vendor hired by State Farm
who arranged for her walls and floors to be repaired, and Leonard
Redway, the plumber whom Ms. Burgess hired to fix a broken pipe, said
Ms. Burgess was being treated worse than their white customers. Both of
them are also Black.
Mr. Redway said claimants in predominantly white, wealthy neighborhoods
generally had a much easier time getting insurers to cover the costs of
repairs. “If I were to be in 90210, it’s almost like it’s an open
check,” he said, referring to the wealthy Beverly Hills ZIP code.
“Sometimes the adjusters don’t even come out to look at it.”
Allegations of racism are often tough to prove, but especially so in
homeowners’ insurance, where insurers have a lot of discretion and don’t
always provide detailed explanations for why claims are denied. Since
company representatives often verify claims and assess the credibility
of a claimant through home visits, face-to-face interactions and other
measures, there can be room for bias.
While claims disputes are hardly uncommon in the industry, many Black
customers say they feel treated unfairly because of their race —
something that Jeff Major, a Manhattan-based public adjuster who haggles
with insurance companies on behalf of policyholders over their claims,
has witnessed in his line of work.
“You can actually see a difference between a Caucasian family and an
African-American, Hispanic or Asian family,” Mr. Major said. “It’s sort
of known. It’s not spoken about. It’s a culture.”
A Tight Grip on Data
Insurers keep a tight lid on their policy sales and claims data. They
have long argued that the size and timing of payouts, and the
neighborhoods where claims are registered and addressed, are proprietary
information, and that sharing that data would hurt their ability to
compete. They guard it so zealously that even most regulators don’t have
detailed information about how insurers assess individual claims.
Michael Barry, a spokesman for the Insurance Information Institute, a
trade group, said that claims data was private because payouts were
considered “losses” and that revealing them would put insurers “at a
competitive disadvantage to each other.”
Where data is publicly available, such as auto insurance, researchers
have found that policies discriminate against Black drivers by charging
them higher premiums. But homeowners’ insurance has been opaque.
.
It can be hard to compel insurers to part with data, partly because they
are regulated by states and not the federal government. For example,
federal laws that outlawed redlining for banks after the civil rights
movement don’t apply equally to insurers. And as of 2014, 17 states had
no bans on race-based discrimination by insurers, a group of university
researchers found.
In late September, the Federal Advisory Committee on Insurance, whose
members include top executives from the nation’s biggest insurers, voted
down a proposal to study racial bias in the industry over concerns that
the study would muddy the distinction between the legitimate discretion
insurers have to question claimants’ assertions and unfair bias.
Distrust and Depositions
To assess the veracity of their customers’ claims, insurers send
adjusters to meet face to face with claimants, giving companies wide
discretion in determining the extent of the damage and which claims to
label potentially fraudulent.
“Anytime there’s a lot of discretion, there’s room for that discretion
to be affected by implicit or explicit bias,” said Tom Baker, a
University of Pennsylvania Law School professor who studied insurance
payouts to victims of Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Using data obtained from
the victims, he found that Latino claimants faced significantly longer
delays in receiving money from insurers than white claimants did.
Lisa Thompson, a Black homeowner in Toledo, Ohio, had been staying with
her daughter while the roof of her home was being repaired when thieves
broke into that house, stripping it bare and taking her water heater and
appliances and wrenching off part of her roof. Ms. Thompson filed a
claim with her insurer, Allstate.
An adjuster sent by the company accused her of orchestrating the theft,
Ms. Thompson said. To pursue her claim, Allstate representatives told
her, she would have to go to the offices of a law firm hired by the
company for a deposition. On Dec. 9, 2019, Ms. Thompson spent nearly
four hours answering questions about her employment history, her family
and her time living in the house.
Allstate sent her a letter on June 8 saying it was still investigating
her claim and asked for another 180 days to complete the process.
Shortly afterward, it canceled her policy, saying its investigator had
determined that Ms. Thompson did not qualify as a “resident” of her
home, because she had been staying with her daughter. But Ms. Thompson
found out that her claim had been denied only when The New York Times
contacted Allstate in November to ask about her case. The insurer had
sent the letter notifying her of the denied claim to the address where
it had ruled Ms. Thompson did not live.
“We apologize for your client not receiving this correspondence,” an
Allstate representative later wrote to a lawyer who is helping Ms.
Thompson with her claim. Her house remains uninhabitable. She is filing
a discrimination claim against Allstate with the Ohio Civil Rights
Commission.
Nicholas Nottoli, an Allstate spokesman, said the claim had been denied
“based on facts after a thorough investigation.” He added that the
company had no record of its adjuster’s accusing Ms. Thompson of helping
the thieves and that “race is not a factor in pricing, underwriting or
claim settlements.”
‘I Am So Lost’
Mr. Young, the vendor hired by State Farm to arrange repairs to Ms.
Burgess’s home, has seen insurers lowballing other Black customers and
lobbied on their behalf — even though his Los Angeles company, Valley
Green, which specializes in fixing damaged homes, depends on insurers
for business.
He fought on behalf of Langston Phillips, who almost lost his house
during a fight with his insurer, Pacific Specialty. Three years ago, Mr.
Phillips’s kitchen had flooded after a pipe burst, ruining portions of
his three-bedroom home in Inglewood. An adjuster from Pacific Specialty
determined that the company owed Mr. Phillips just over $11,000 in
repair costs. Mr. Phillips’s contractor said his home needed far more
extensive repairs.
Pacific Specialty asked Mr. Young to take a look. Mr. Young determined
that the repairs would cost more than $33,000. A battle ensued, with Mr.
Young siding with Mr. Phillips even though he had been hired by Pacific
Specialty.
Because of the dispute, even the sum Pacific Specialty agreed to pay Mr.
Phillips reached him in increments, forcing him to move to a single
hotel room with his two children while he waited for his kitchen to be
rebuilt. On a particularly bad day he emailed a Pacific Specialty
representative, pleading for clarity on when some of that money would
arrive. “I AM SO LOST,” he wrote.
“We aim to pay claims as quickly and fairly as possible to bring the
insured back to their pre-loss living standard,” said Kara Holzwarth,
Pacific Specialty’s general counsel. “We find that water leak losses can
be fraught with disagreement.” She said Pacific Specialty’s treatment of
Mr. Phillips had nothing to do with his race.
After two years of fighting, Mr. Phillips gave up. Worried about losing
the house, he moved back in and began to work weekends to pay for the
repairs — replacing cabinets, flooring and plumbing — that he was doing
himself. “I am bone tired,” he said.
Mr. Young, meanwhile, has noticed that most insurers are not willing to
work with him. He is now suing 17 insurance companies, one by one, for
discrimination, after the companies refused to add him to their vendor
lists. He reached a confidential settlement in his suit against
Travelers and has complaints pending against others.
“I’m the only one rattling the cages,” he said, “saying why won’t you
give minority-owned vendors any work?”
Niraj Chokshi contributed reporting.
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