People in Grand Prairie, Arlington, Saginaw, Bedford, Hurst, Euless, Grapevine, Colleyville, Grapevine, Keller, Boyd, Newark, or anywhere else in and around Tarrant County should know a little bit about the insurance company they are buying their insurance from.
The Texas Department of Insurance is a good resource to use to learn about almost all insurance companies doing business in the State of Texas. Their web-site is easy to navigate and contains lots of useful information on insurance companies and insurance agents and insurance adjustors. It has information related to licensing and information related to complaints filed. There is also a lot of information about the financial viability of the companies.
The site has lots of general information. Surfing their web-site will usually result in finding out information you did not know and are glad you discovered.
The Houston Chronicle published an article on November 4, 2011, titled, Farmers Insurance Leads in Consumer Claim Complaints. The article is written by Purva Patel, who has written numerous articles covering the insurance industry in Texas.
The article tells us that Farmers Insurance has received more complaints about its handling of homeowners claims than any other insurer in Texas, yet it is the third largest insurer. Most people only look at prices when shopping for insurance. But rest assured, that when if comes to making a claim for benefits that you want an insurance company that is going to be responsive to your claim and fulfill their responsibilities under the contract of insurance. The number of complaints filed against Farmers is 207, between October 1, 2010, and September 30, 2011.
State Farm, the largest insurer had 198, while Allstate the second largest insurer, had 159. The number of complaints does not tell the whole story because many people do not file legitimate complaints because they either do not know how or they hired an attorney who helped to get the situation resolved.
A spokesman for Farmers says, “Everyone we deal with is dealt with as fairly, efficiently and as quickly as we can to resolve their issues, and we work very diligently to resolve each and every claim.”
The number of complaints for most all insurance companies is small compared with the thousands of claims handled each year. But again, the number of complaints actually filed does not usually tell the whole story.
Texas Watch, a consumer watchdog group, says the data is still an important measure of how companies stack up against each other.
A spokesman for Texas Watch says “Farmers stands out as a company with more complaints than anyone else, and that’s a very telling distinction.”
The data does not include complaints about coverage or premium issues, but those dealing with payment delays, underpayments, denials and other matters pertaining to how claims are handled.
Unfortunately from a evaluation standpoint, the numbers do not break down how many complaints are justified. What is relevant though is that the Texas Department of Insurance can dismiss complaints without investigating if it feels the complaints fall outside its jurisdiction.
The spokesman for Texas Watch said “We weren’t interested in what TDI thought of the complaints. We were interested in how many people were registering dissatisfaction with their carrier.”
The arthur of this blog would suggest that an experienced Insurance Law Attorney should be consulted before filing a complaint with TDI. The reason is that the wording used in the complaint needs to be proper in case a lawsuit ensues. The person filing a complaint does not want something they wrote in a complaint to come back and hurt their claim.
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