The Tease of Things I Don't Need

Scambusters: A Call To Action

Perhaps you can help me, and in the process we can help some others.

My wife and I are dealing with a situation involving an insurance company regarding payments for a short and long term disability policy.


This is something we've made quarterly payments into for at least seven years, against a day when her health might take a drastic turn for the worst. Such a day came this past year, and she's been eligible for payments since mid-summer. After a rough start as we got used to the forms, we received a few payments... and then late November - when we'd expect the next check, and which we'd filed the periodic paperwork for earlier in the month - came and went with no check in our hands. A little over a week into December, we placed a follow-up call at which time they claimed that one of the forms wasn't filed with them back in November, and that they were just dropping another copy in the mail that week.

This was part of a small packet of forms faxed to them in November for something they were scheduled to pay out on before the end of the month... yet they waited until December 12th - after we called - to "notice" something wasn't there, and then leisurely drop another form in the standard mail. This was soon "remedied" - though all indications on our end are that the forms went through the first time - with another copy of the form faxed back to them.

Tomorrow is December 30th, just about the time we would be expecting the next check... and there's no sign that even the drastically overdue amount is about to arrive.

Now that I have a few days off, tomorrow we'll be calling them again to apply some pressure. With some luck we'll have the situation straightened out shortly, but even if that's the case it's not something I'll want to just brush aside.

My thoughts on the matter are that we have two possibilities here:

Sheer incompetence.

and/or

A systematic attempt to do whatever possible to increase financial tensions on the part of the policyholders in the hope that they, strapped for cash and robbing Peter to pay Paul while waiting for the check to arrive, will be late in getting the next quarterly payment in, thereby giving the insurance company the legal grounds to cancel the policy. After all, this insurance game isn't much fun for them when they actually have to pay out.

Paint me cynical, but I'm inclined to see a bit of both.

Our next quarterly payment is due in just over two weeks, and I'll be sending this (and future payments) via certified mail to ensure that they can't claim payment wasn't made. Hopefully they'll have paid us well before then so I won't have to dip into other cash to do so. I'd sincerely hoped the days of lurching from paycheck to paycheck were well behind us, but here they are again -- and this game gets old real fast as some of you are doubtless intimately familiar.

2006 is an important mid-term election year for Congress. Given all of the scandals raging through the federal government I have to believe that most of these candidates - especially imcumbents - would achieve orgasm if they could get hold of an issue that would resonate with the electorate and allow them to focus on corruption that they're not party to. Public crusading material that focuses on corporate victimization of people in dire circumstances. The sort of thing that a huge hump of the population graph is either looking at now or is at least looking at as a serious possibility for the near future. This is nearly an ideal issue for them, aside from how compromised they might be due to campaign contributions from the insurance lobby. Still, hey... then it becomes a doubly useful issue for a challenger as it connects with the public and simultaneously tars the incumbent by association. If there's something at all to it, it'll be used by one side or the other.

So, what I'd like you to do is check around and see if any of this sounds familiar to you, family,friends, co-workers, etc. I'd like to hear about anything of substance -- people who are either dealing with the same thing now or went through it at some time in the past. Information can be posted in the comments here, or sent to me at miraclo@hotmail.com. I'm understandably curious to see if this is and had been a rampant situation.

It's too easy to imagine how people in truly desperate financial circumstances could simply find themselves overwhelmed and seemingly powerless in the grip of such a squeeze, and if that's the case it shouldn't remain a secret. I do not promise to lead a crusade, but if this amounts to enough cases to make abuses clear I would feel compelled to pass the information along to people in positions to do something about it, or at least those able to turn up the heat.