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Archive for the ‘Insurance and Consumer Rights’ Category

Insurance Company Giving You The Runaround?

Saturday, February 18th, 2012

Is an insurance company giving you the runaround? Insurance companies are in the business of giving customers and legitimate claimants the runaround on valid claims…denying claims, delaying payment, lowballing with settlement offers, etc. You may have a claim against the insurance company for another driver who was at fault in an automobile accident; you may have a life insurance company refusing to pay benefits of a recently deceased relative; or you may have a homeowners or business insurance policy denying a property damage or business loss claim. Whatever the reason an insurance company is giving you the runaround, there is only one answer to your problem. You need an attorney experienced in insurance law and insurance claims. Insurance companies employ legions of professional claims analysts and claims adjusters, as well as teams of insurance defense attorneys to make sure you don’t get what you deserve because that’s how they make larger profits…denying claims and lowballing settlement offers.

Insurance company giving you the run-around? Call CGWC for a free consultation about your personal injury, death or property insurance claim.

Posted in Auto Accidents, Choosing the Right Lawyer, Insurance and Consumer Rights, Wrongful Death | No Comments »

Study Shows Insurance Industry Creates Crises

Tuesday, December 20th, 2011

Americans for Insurance Reform released a new study earlier this week showing how the insurance industry periodically manufactures crises to boost profits. The study, titled “Repeat Offenders: How The Insurance Industry Manufactures Crises And Harms America” shows that property and casualty insurers work together to create periods of crisis, known as “hard markets”. The industry often uses these periods of manufactured crisis to have their lobbyists argue for “tort reform”, feigning ignorance of the fact that the crisis and the resluting rate hikes were created by collusion amongst the insurers themselves. The study’s authors  say that the cycles of boom and bust “are national in scope and occur in every state irrespective of a state’s ‘tort’ law. Because the legal system is not responsible for creating hard markets, enactment of so-called ‘tort reform’ has done nothing to prevent them”. A thorough summary of the AIR report’s findings, as well as a link to the complete report, can be found here. The report warns that in recent months the insurance has been trying to create a new hard insurance market. The study has been sent to all 50 state insurance commissioners and the newly formed Federal Insurance Office, urging stronger regulation of the insurance industry and a repeal of the anti-trust exemption granted under the McCarran-Ferguson Act. For a good idea of how Florida has been affected by these insurance industry manipulations, read the Sarasota Herald-Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize-winning series on property insurance in Florida here.

Posted in Insurance and Consumer Rights, Uncategorized | Comments Off

Starbucks Gift Cards Are Bad For Consumers Rights

Thursday, December 8th, 2011

Earlier this week several consumer advocate groups banded together to ask Starbucks to respect the rights of consumers. The massive coffee retailer recently added forced arbitration clauses and class-action bans to the terms of service on their pre-paid gift cards. These type of policies limit consumers’ access to our court system, and such policies fly in the face of Starbucks’ long history of portraying their company as a firm believer in social responsibility.

Use of forced arbitration clauses has skyrocketed in the past decade, and serve to protect corporations from accountability for their wrongdoing. In this case, if you are using a Starbucks gift card and find out you were charged hidden fees or being charged for items you did not receive, you will be forced to fly to Seattle and seek a refund from an arbitrator hand-picked by Starbucks’ corporate office. Obviously not many consumers would want to incur the travel and hotel expenses of such a trip just to be refunded a few dollars. If Starbucks uses this protection and charges ten million consumers a $2 hidden fee for using the card, that would create $20 million dollars of fraudulent earnings for the company. The consumers affected would be barred from joining a class action to seek redress of these losses. Starbucks would only have to answer to those consumers who traveled to Seattle to face the arbitrator that Starbucks selected. This type of corporate behavior is anti-consumer, and the hypothetical situation above is no fantasy. Just last month, the state of Massachusetts fined Starbucks for charging customers an added fee on every bag of coffee purchased, without disclosing the fee. If you want to read more, and sign a petition asking Starbucks to stop hiding forced arbitration clauses on their pre-paid cards, you can read the Public Citizen letter to Starbucks and sign the petition here.

Posted in Insurance and Consumer Rights, Uncategorized | Comments Off

Your Medical Records Are Important

Sunday, November 20th, 2011

When we try cases for clients who are injured in automobile and other accidents, we invariably watch them questioned incessantly and throughout their jury trial about what their medical records say and don’t say. Often, in their own hand, questions are answered on physician office intake forms in a way that makes the clients look dishonest. We know these misstatements and errors are most often completely innocent, but explaining it to a jury is virtually impossible when the client is before them asking for money for injuries.

Remember that your medical records are important. Not only does your doctor rely upon them in giving you medical advice and recommending treatment options, but if you are involved in an insurance claim, a disability claim, or litigation arising from an injury of any kind, lawyers will use them against you whenever and wherever they can. Be careful about how you answer the dozens of questions on the clipboard when visiting a new doctor. Think about someone questioning your about what you write in those forms, and even imagine if you are one of the unlucky ones who is later involved in an accident that is no fault of your own: could this be used against me? Mainly, you want to be sure you are painstakingly honest and precise as possible. Otherwise, you may find yourself hoisted on the petard of your own medical records when making an insurance or injury claim.

Posted in Auto Accidents, Insurance and Consumer Rights, Personal Injury | Comments Off

Doctors Accept Kickbacks, But Don’t Pay the Price

Tuesday, November 1st, 2011

Since 2008, major pharmaceutical companies have paid $6.5 billion to settle accusations of paying kickbacks and engaging in marketing fraud. The doctors who accept these kickbacks, in return for widely prescribing a particular pharmaceutical (or advocating that it be prescribed for off-label uses) have been named as co-defendants in many of these lawsuits. In the lawsuits that settled in the past 3 years against pharmaceutical companies for this type of marketing fraud, 75 doctors were named as co-defendants. A recent investigation by ProPublica found that not one of these doctors has been disciplined for the instrumental role they played in these fraudulent practices.

The practice of acting as a paid spokesman is one we are all familiar with. Michael Jordan tells us that Hanes makes good underwear, but we all realize that he is being paid by Hanes to do so. For a doctor to use the respected position they enjoy in our society to influence how patients make decisions about their health is to be expected. However, for them do so based on which pharmaceutical company is paying them the biggest kickback, without disclosing those transactions to the patient, is verging on criminal.

We applaud the decisions that have forced drugmakers to pay for the fraudulent marketing schemes they have pursued. However, this fraudulent marketing only works when there are two sides involved: the pharmaceutical company and the doctor. As long as the doctors implicated in these frauds are not disciplined or held accountable, the pharmaceutical companies will continue paying doctors kickbacks to push their products for uses not approved by the FDA, or to patients who would be better served by other medicines. The Justice Department usually pursues these claims based on information provided by “whistleblowers” from the pharmaceutical companies. The drugmakers settle these cases for huge amounts of money, although the sums involved are negligible when compared to the revenues generated by the drugs they are marketing. The doctors, although they seem to be the “small fish” in a case like this, are equally culpable and should be held accountable whenever they are complicit in these fraudulent practices. Without such a precedent being set, the pharma companies will look at these settlements as an acceptable cost of doing business, and find another doctor willing to accept kickbacks. The only way to stop this cycle of fraud is to hold ALL of the guilty parties responsible.

Posted in Insurance and Consumer Rights, Nursing Home Abuse and Neglect, Product Liability | Comments Off

Whistleblower Claims and Medicare Fraud

Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

Recently in Miami, several people, including doctors and nurses, were sued for Medicare fraud schemes. Their scams involved over 159 million dollars in fraudulent billing to Medicare. Another person in Miami was sued in a separate lawsuit for Medicare fraud totaling a million dollars. Medicare fraud costs the U.S. Government and taxpayers millions, possibly billions, every year.

If you are a doctor, a nurse, or other health care employee, and you know about Medicare fraud anywhere in your industry, you can do your part to eliminate Medicare fraud and do so without fear of retaliation by the scam artists. You can become a whistleblower by hiring a private law firm familiar with whistleblower claims to represent you and recover money for the U.S. government. As a reward, you could get a percentage of the government’s collection in the prosecution of the fraud. Often, this reward can be hundreds of thousands of dollars, and maybe more. A federal whistleblower law providing for such rewards is designed to encourage private citizens to report fraud that costs the U.S. government and taxpayers. Medicare fraud is just one kind of whistleblower case. Any business that bills the federal government is subject to the corrupting influence of scam artists seeking to defraud taxpayers and seeing the government as an easy target.

If you are aware of Medicare fraud or other government fraud, call us for a free confidential consultation about your legal rights and how you can help stamp out fraud.

Posted in Choosing the Right Lawyer, Insurance and Consumer Rights | Comments Off

Hurricane Damage? Time is of the Essence in Making a Claim

Friday, July 15th, 2011

Hurricane season is upon us, and every Floridian is obviously hoping to have another year free of major hurricane damage to our state. While we are all hoping for the best, it is only prudent to plan for the worst. If our state is affected by hurricanes this year, and homes or businesses are damaged, Floridians will work together to get our state “back to normal” as quickly as possible. It is a fine quality that we have seen emerge in the wake of disasters all over the country: people banding together to help out neighbors, friends, and strangers alike, to deal with the after-effects of catastrophic storms. Witnessing this spirit of co-operation has made us proud to be Americans time and time again, and has been very important to the rebuilding efforts of those areas affected by natural disaster in recent years. However, one of the first avenues to recovering from the damage a major storm can inflict is the homeowner’s insurance that we pay for year in and year out, to protect us in the event that such damage should occur. 

Colling Gilbert Wright & Carter urge you to plan for the unpleasant, but very real, possibility of serious storms and the damage to your home that they can so easily cause. While many people plan for pre-hurricane preparation, by purchasing plastic sheeting and duct tape, and batteries for lights and radios, plans for post-hurricane are not nearly as common. After the 2004-2005 seasons, which did such serious damage to the state of Florida, the country’s major home insurers such as Allstate and State Farm simply fled the state. The homes and businesses of Floridians are now all insured by a patchwork of smaller insurers who may not, in the event of a major storm, even have sufficient funds to pay out on the claims they receive. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune won a 2010 Pulitzer Prize for their wonderful investigative reporting on the state of home insurance in Florida, which you can link to here.

When filing an insurance claim for hurricane damage in Florida, it is important that you remember that time is of the essence. A recent court case denied a homeowner financial compensation for hurricane damage because the claim was not filed in a timely manner. The homeowner has a “duty to cooperate” in most insurance contracts, and to delay making your claim could wind up denying you your benefits. If your home is damaged by a hurricane or other major storm this year, you should immediately schedule a home inspection to assess the damage. You should then immediately notify your home insurer, to satisfy your duty to cooperate in a timely fashion. At that point, contact Colling Gilbert Wright & Carter. Our experienced attorneys can help you deal with the insurance companies, to be sure that your interests are protected as you deal with insurers who may go to any lengths to protect their own bottom lines by denying your claims.

  

Posted in Choosing the Right Lawyer, Insurance and Consumer Rights | Comments Off

Hot Coffee: New Documentary Exposes the True Story of Tort Reform

Wednesday, July 13th, 2011

Recent Supreme Court decisions have chipped away at the right of consumers to seek justice in class actions when they are wronged by corporations. They have granted big businesses the ability to donate unlimited sums of money, anonymously, to political campaigns. They have protected corporations from facing consequences for polluting the environment. And they have ensured that the makers of generic pharmaceuticals cannot be held liable for damages caused by their products. The last two terms of the Supreme Court have rightly been called the most big-business friendly period in the history of our country’s highest court. The decisions mentioned above have certainly done damage to the rights of consumers in America. However, sometimes the most serious damage to consumers’ rights has been done with a little help from the consumers themselves. A fascinating new documentary by a former plaintiffs’ attorney tells the story of how this came to be.

“Jackpot Justice”, “Runaway Juries”, and ”Frivolous Lawsuits”. These phrases came to be the rallying cries of what seemed to be a grassroots movement in the 1990s and early 2000’s. These slogans were repeated endlessly in the name of “tort reform”, in what was essentially a corporate ad campaign for the wholesale re-shaping of the American civil justice system. Have you ever heard the one about the little old lady who spilled McDonald’s coffee on herself while driving, and won millions of dollars by suing the company? Of course you have. A very specific version of her story was repeated thousands of times, like a children’s fable designed to impart a moral lesson through repetition.  Comedians joked about it. News anchors repeated the myth in mocking tones. And the narrative was accepted and agreed upon. Our civil justice system was out of control. People were trying to get rich by pursuing frivolous lawsuits, and runaway juries were granting that wish. If anyone questioned those notions, one could just mention the little old lady who became a millionaire because her coffee was hot. Argument over.

The problem, it turns out, is that not many people knew the real story. The little old lady was not driving. She was parked. She was sitting in the passenger seat. And the coffee? It was kept at 190 degrees, 70 degrees hotter than any normal coffee maker would get to, and hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns on contact. Which, in fact, it did. The burns required skin grafts. Over 700 people had already been burned similarly by McDonald’s coffee. The little old lady did not become a millionaire. She had not even wanted to go to court, but for McDonald’s to cover her medical bills. They refused, and insisted on litigation. The facts of this case are so different from the popular perception of what happened that it makes one wonder how we were all so deceived.

“Hot Coffee” is a new documentary airing on HBO which explores the infamous McDonald’s coffee claim, and 3 other cases, to show how big business interests have manipulated public perception to support a drastic transformation of our nation’s civil justice system. Large corporations spent enormous sums of money to bombard the media with messages from seemingly grass-roots organizations devoted to so-called “tort reform”. By repeating buzzwords endlessly, and presenting a decidedly one-sided narrative of an out-of-control justice system, these corporations were able to effectively re-arrange the landscape of civil justice in America. These political “spin” techniques were so effective that millions of Americans bought into the idea of “tort reform”, “runaway juries”, and “jackpot justice”. The problem is, when one of those Americans is now suffering as a result of corporate negligence or wrongdoing, they find their ability to seek justice through the court system has been significantly diminished.

“Hot Coffee” is a sobering look at what has been happening to civil justice in America over the past decade. Plaintiffs’ rights attorneys like Colling Gilbert Wright & Carter fight every day to help average citizens seek justice when they are harmed by the negligence or wrongdoing of enormously powerful corporate interests. It is one of the most admirable qualities of our justice system that all litigants- powerful or weak, rich or poor- are on equal footing in the eyes of the law. This level playing field has been increasingly tilted in recent years, to protect powerful interests from liability for their own actions (or failures to act). The fact that average Americans have been duped into supporting measures which restrict their access to the justice system is regrettable. The information presented in “Hot Coffee” makes a huge first step towards educating the public on what so-called “tort reform” has actually accomplished. 

“Hot Coffee” is showing now on HBO. For those without premium cable, many good video clips and interviews of the people involved can be found here.

Posted in Insurance and Consumer Rights, Personal Injury, Product Liability, Uncategorized | Comments Off

Jury Awards $ 19 Million Against Insurer

Thursday, June 9th, 2011

A jury recently awarded a former U.S. marine $ 19 million in a case he brought after his insurer wrongfully denied his covered claims arising from a lengthy hospital stay. The marine had a procedure that was slated for a 19 day stay and circumstances required a lengthy 109 day stay instead. The insurance company denied his claims, and the lawsuit ensued. Juries don’t like it when insurance companies second guess doctors on what treatment is medically necessary. The marine had an accident indemnity policy that was supposed to pay $ 350 a day for non-medical expenses such as rent and electricity while he was hospitalized. If your insurance company denies your claim, call CGWC for a free consultation.

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Buy Uninsured Motorist Coverage

Friday, June 3rd, 2011

Uninsured motorist coverage, which insures you and your family for injuries when the motorist at fault is uninsured or underinsured, is more important in Florida than in most states. A study by the Insurance Research Council in 2009 found Florida to have more uninsured drivers than most states and that the problem was likely to get worse with the recession. That has certainly been our experience at CGWC The Florida Firm over the last 3 to 5 years. The incidence of uninsured and underinsured motorists seems more frequent than ever. That means many people who neglected to buy uninsured motorist coverage when they renewed their automobile insurance policies are unprotected. Many of them have come to our office for help that just isn’t there because of a lack of liability insurance and uninsured motorist insurance. Many have been the victims of tragedies as serious as fatal auto and motorcycle accidents. Don’t be penny wise and pound foolish when you renew your automobile insurance and don’t assume that “full coverage” means what it says. Ask your agent about uninsured motorist coverage, and make sure you buy it for your family.

Posted in Auto Accidents, Insurance and Consumer Rights, Motorcycle Accidents | Comments Off

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