Benefits & ERISA Law

Insurance Coverage, Tuberculosis, and that Guy on the Plane

You see, everything at the end of the day is about insurance. Risk sharing that allows smaller businesses to move forward with operations, plaintiffs’ decisions over who has enough insurance to warrant suing, even the economic dislocations of climate change - everything comes back to the insurance industry. Here’s a great example, and an amusing one. Remember the lawyer who flew across the Atlantic after being diagnosed with tuberculosis? And who naturally was thereafter sued by other passengers who became quite worried about what they might have picked up from the guy? (Your faithful correspondent here moves three rows away on a commuter train if someone even sniffles, so I certainly have sympathies for those other passengers.) Well, he notified his homeowner’s insurer of those cases and the insurer is paying to defend him, but it has now launched the real battle, namely litigation over whether or not there is coverage for these claims against him; if there isn’t, he’s stuck paying any judgments or settlements. You can find the whole story here. A couple of interesting side points. First, there is no doubt the insurer is, as the article suggests, taking the right tack here; the proper approach is to defend and simultaneously ask a court to declare whether there is any coverage. This is particularly so in this instance because of the second side point, which is that, on first glance, those coverage defenses of the homeowner’s insurer noted in the article aren’t the best; without even knowing the facts beyond what I’ve read in the media in the past or reading the complaint, I can spot the potential holes in their arguments from here. When coverage is particularly debatable, it makes no sense for an insurer to simply deny coverage and leave the insured on its own, because of the potential exposures - a long story, best saved for another day - that can attach to the insurer if it is wrong in deciding that there is no coverage; rather, the best tactical play in that situation is to defend the insured, and to not deny coverage unless and until a court agrees there is no coverage. The downsides to the insurer in that situation are nothing more than the costs of litigating the coverage question and possibly, depending on the jurisdiction, having to pay the insured’s costs in the coverage litigation if the court decides there is coverage; that’s a heck of a lot cheaper than the potential liabilities, including bad faith judgments, that can attach to an insurer that simply denies coverage on its own, and is later found to have been wrong.

Full post as published by Boston ERISA Law Blog on January 18, 2008 (boomark / email).