California Insurance Commissioner Petitioned to “Kick [UnumProvident] the Hell Out” of California
Disability insurer UnumProvident was recently fined $15 million and ordered to reopen 115,000 claims in a multi-state regulatory settlement, and the California Department of Insurance separately fined Unum $8 million and ordered the insurance company to reopen an additional 26,000 claims. The fines against UnumProvident were the largest in insurance regulatory history. Now one of the San Francisco attorneys who assisted in the three-year investigation of Unum, Ray Bourhis, has petitioned California Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi to “make good on his promise to kick the Company the hell out of the largest insurance market in the world. And that’s what I’m calling on Garamendi to do. Period.”
Bourhis tells the Insurance Journal:
John Garamendi was right last October when he called UnumProvident an “outlaw company.” That’s exactly what they are. And Garamendi should make good on his promise to kick them out of California if they continue breaking the law.
The investigation of Unum concluded that the disability insurance company was engaged in widespread violations of state insurance regulations and bad faith claim denials and terminations. According to Bourhis, “The truth is that no matter how much you fine them, it still pays for them to do this. . . The company is making the disabled destitute, policyholders whose claims it was ordered to reopen, wait — often for years — for their reevaluations. This is despite the fact that the law requires claims to be handled ‘promptly, fairly and expeditiously.”
