AutoMuse®

Sure seems like it.  While you are away on the crusade, make sure your car doesn’t go out with anyone else.

Biometric Solutions is offering a new technology for keeping your vehicle safe.  It’s a fingerprint identification device that will only allow the vehicle to start if there is a match between the entered fingerprint and one registered for the vehicle. Finally, a way to keep your teenager from nipping out in the Porsche while you are on vacation.

Car Theft Prevention | Immobilizer | Fingerprint Car Security

Once again, on Monday February 12, AutoMuse® is hosting Blawg Review #95, the elite place to be for all things blawgable. Attorneys and Automobiles, Lawyers and Lincolns (after all, February 12 just happens to be that great President’s birthday, as well as my Mom’s and my estates & trusts Professor’s).

For those submissions to the sphere of blawgatoria, feel free to visit Blawg Review’s post submission page.  I’m certainly looking forward to all things court and cars.

Good news for the wretched homeless in Mississippi!  Their “good neighbor” State Farm is opening its wallet and will be paying homeowners’ claims pursuant to a settlement agreement entered into after the first trial made it full policy limits of $223,000 and $2.5 Million in punitive damages poorer.  Yes, from State Farm’s perspective, the homeless in MS are picking the pockets of the insurance giant.  How did the homeless accomplish this task?  By daring to publicize how shamefully State Farm treated them.  I guess they should have gone on living under cardboard boxes rather than rebuilding their homes.

You might ask why SF caved?  Publicity, dear, publicity.  According to the New York Times, “the insurers became tired of being called insensitive and uncaring about the victims of Hurricane Katrina.”  Well, wasn’t that just what insurers were doing?  People who paid premiums to have insurance, and whose mortgage holders certainly insisted they pay those premiums, were being niggled to death about whether (no pun intended) the root cause of the loss was the hurricane, flood, rain, or some other cause.  Newsflash.  These people lost their homes.  They weren’t trying to get completely new carpet for the house because their three-year-old spilled cherry Koolaid in the living room.  They suffered the devastating loss of their homes and belongings and insurers were trying to claim they were only responsible for the last foot of damage.

What makes the State Farm issue particularly compelling is that SF is a mutual insurance company, which means that the policyholders actually own the company like shareholders.  (If I go wrong here, the RiskProf will set me straight.)  This, of course, raises all kinds of questions about whether policyholder/owners could initiate a vote as to whether catastrophic claims should be paid.  It also makes me wonder if there isn’t a really good argument to be made that SF has a fiduciary responsibility to its policyholders as companies do to their shareholders.

The bottom line is that Mississippi homeowners will be getting claims paid by State Farm, which includes, of course, Senator Trent Lott.  I certainly hope State Farm doesn’t think this belated show of good neighborliness will convince Senator L to back down on his introduction of any legislation mandating public disclosure of total loss VINs (to stop title washing) or federal regulation of insurers.  The one good thing about the fact that SF denied Senator Lott’s claim along with all of the other homeowners is that at least we can sleep well knowing that all affected homeowners were sleeping on cots out in the open — the high and the low.

Consumers living in Connecticut are truly getting their money’s worth in Attorney General, Richard Blumenthal.  Not only does he do his job as Attorney General, which he clearly performs with genuine passion for protecting the public, but now he is doing the Insurance Department’s as well.

 Today, the AG’s office issued this press release Attorney General Drafts Stronger Law Prohibiting Insurers From Steering Consumers To Select Auto Repair Shops and the AG held a press conference to announce changes he wants to see to the toothless and unenforced current version of the anti-steering law.  The current law simply prohibits insurers from “requiring” car owners to take their vehicles to particular repair facilities.  AG Blumenthal’s version would prevent insurers from even requesting that claimants patronize select shops and prevent them from using some not-so-subtle word-track to shove claimants toward shops that have signed agreements with insurers.  (Those agreements deserve some scrutiny by the AG themselves given that they are designed to benefit the insurer and often include terms that work against the repair customer — all unbeknownst to that customer; but right now, I think the AG has earned a well-deserved respite.) 

What word-tracks am I talking about?  Well, if you recently had a motor vehicle accident (it doesn’t really matter which state), you probably heard something like these well-rehearsed, telemarketing-type, word-tracks: 

 ”Well, you can take your vehicle to any shop you want, but X insurance company can only guarantee the repairs if you take it to one of our preferred facilitites.” or maybe you got:

“You can take your car to that shop, if you really want to, but we won’t be able to send an adjuster out to do a damage estimate for at least two weeks.  But if you take it to shops X, Y, or Z, they will be able to start on your repairs tomorrow.” (One of my typical responses to this is, “I guess you need to take some of those record profits insurers are always declaring and invest some of it into customer service areas by hiring additional adjusters.”)  or perhaps:

“Shop A is very difficult to work with.  We can’t ever get an agreed price from them, so you’ll have to pay a lot of money for the repair out of your own pocket.”

When the existing version of the anti-steering statute was being considered by the Legislature, it was voted positively out of the Transportation Committee with the inclusion of this language that insurers “also cannot intimidate, coerce, threaten, or provide an incentive or inducement to influence the use of a specific service or product.”  (OLR Bill Analysis, sHB 5793, October 1, 1992, Transportation Committee).  All of the intimidation, coercion, incentive, or threat language got excised from the bill during its trip through th Insurance and Real Estate Committee, and Connecticut ended up with an anti-steering bill, the spirit of which insurers routinely violate.

Of course, the Connecticut Insurance Department doesn’t see a problem with the coercive tactics insurers use to promote their direct repair programs — which include terms and conditions that actually harm consumers.  It has to make one wonder what the CID does to earn its keep.  After all, if the AG is doing both his job and the Insurance Department’s, who needs the CID?  Perhaps the citizens of Connecticut deserve a little rate decrease of their own.  If the CID gets cancelled now, CT citizens might get some premium back.  If nothing else, they at least won’t have the CID obstructing every attempt made by citizens, groups, and, yes, even the Attorney General to get information about insurer practices and enforcement action for alleged insurer violations of the State’s laws and regulations.