Your Insurance: You Know What to Expect

(Question from a member of the audience regarding what do you do when you reach an impasse.)

(Braga's response)
It is interesting that you bring that up because that is something I forgot to mention. In the past when you reached an impasse: let's say that you didn't even enforce your rights, or you didn't want to understand your claim, but eventually you realized that you weren't getting what you felt you were entitled to. And you decided at that point that you had an impasse and the way to solve it at that time was though an appraisal proceeding. It's an informal way of getting it resolved without going to court. It's a form of arbitration. You select an appraiser, the company selects an appraiser, both appraisers select an umpire. Those kinds of procedures usually went pretty quickly and they're very inexpensive because all you needed for expertise was someone who understood the loss. It could be an adjuster, it could be an appraiser, it could be a judge, it could be an attorney--it could be a lot of different people. That was how things were resolved.

Recently in a dialogue I had with the department of insurance in Massachusetts, they told me that in the new language the umpire is no longer selected now. The appraisers just talk amongst themselves and if they can't agree then later they go to find an umpire, and that doesn't make sense to me and I told them it didn't really make sense, because can you imagine playing a ball game and waiting till you have a disagreement before you figure out who is going to be the umpire. You should know the parties to the transaction going in. But at any rate..at any rate, after that..after that, I found out that the whole appraisal process has been eliminated..eliminated. It's gone! I didn't know it until I got my own policy. This was just last week, and I'm looking through my own policy and I find out there is an endorsement hereby eliminating the whole process of appraisal, and in its place you have to go to court to have the court appoint three referees. Now you don't have a choice in either one of those three. Before you had a choice of one of the appraisers. Now you don't have a choice, and you have to go to court, which is always more expensive to go to court, no matter what the procedure is. It's more expensive and it's more time consuming. So that's really the news. I'm glad you brought it up because that's quite a set-back for us all. We no longer have that available to us as a means to resolve our problems.

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