Insurer Won’t Pay Ike Claim Without Documentation for Lost Items
Houston Chronicle—August 12th, 2010
After Hurricane Ike swept away the first floor of Donald Box’s Bayou Vista home, he and his wife made a list of 376 missing items for their flood insurer, which quickly paid the claim.
A few months later, they compiled another list of things they’d missed or didn’t have time to estimate values for the first time around: guns, a drill press and 126 other items. But the insurer wouldn’t pay that claim unless the couple could provide receipts to prove they owned the items, Box said.
The new requirement puzzled Box, who has been trying to get payment for nearly two years and filed a related lawsuit last December.
He and others say the requirement could make it more difficult for home-owners to recover insurance proceeds in the future.
“They set their own precedent on what they needed for documentation, and now they want to change it?” Box said. “That would mean you have two standards of doing business.”
[...]
Receipts and pictures can help speed a claim along, especially for bigger-ticket items. But consumer advocates say that if insurers were to start requiring receipts, it could make it more difficult for policyholders to collect on claims, especially in a case such as the Boxes’ situation, where pictures and documents were swept away by floodwaters.
“If they do this, and they get away with it, it sets a terrible precedent moving forward,” said Alex Winslow, executive director of Texas Watch, an Austin-based consumer group. “Certainly homeowners should take steps to provide whatever documentation they have, but for the company to require receipts of every item is just unreasonable.”
Read More: Houston Chronicle
