"The Rainmaker" Revisited

The insurance industry, in failing to reign in nefarious abuses by member companies as portrayed in the movie "The Rainmaker", must be held accountable.

I strongly condemn the premeditated murder of insurance executive Brian Thompson, for which there are no mitigating defenses, regardless of abuses by his company and/or the insurance industry.

The murder does, however, highlight how serious the abuses have exacerbated over the years, in spite of whatever lessons the industry and the public may have learned from the exposé of such abuses in the excellent movie, “The Rainmaker”.

The apparent surge of health insurance companies resisting payments has spilled over to travel insurance companies and recalls a complaint that I recently filed on Yelp! against a travel insurance company. The following is an excerpt from my complaint about a travel insurance company to whom I paid over $1,000 in premiums for my wife and me:

It " was a nightmare and took 5 months and 14 calls to receive medical coverage of $244.85 for a simple doctor visit for which all required documentation was immediately submitted but only after it took 7 calls over 5 weeks to obtain a claim form and claim # and then another 5 calls over 3 months to obtain the $244.85. As the number of calls I kept making to [I am omitting the name of the company, that I was referred to on a popular travel insurance referral site] increased, I kept thinking of the movie "The Rainmaker" with Matt Damon, in which an insurance company issued a secret "Memorandum U” to its claims executives exhorting them to do whatever they could to stall, stall and stall payments of claims for the toxic pollution of streams by the company they were insuring. In my case, their records and responses were routinely that more information was needed until, on the 14th call and 5 months later, a manager finally acknowledged that the original claim that I submitted included all the documentation that was requested. While I could have walked away from this in frustration, it was the principle that counted with the feeling that this was either all due to gross inefficiencies and incompetence, or it was a scam."

I should add that I may have been successful only because I ultimately revealed to them that I was a lawyer and implied that I would not take “No” for an answer.

Unfortunately, it appears that this practice is all too common in the insurance industry.