It’s a pretty fair assumption that the dense and turgid language dominating weighty insurance contracts isn’t for the benefit of policyholders.
After all, they’d be able to understand it if it was, right?
The inarguable fact is that many policyholders and beneficiaries with life insurance policies and other types of insurance coverage understandably look at their policies the way that insurers intend them to – with a good-faith attempt to glean the basics and a hope-for-the-best attitude thereafter.
“Insurance policies are … hard to navigate for regular consumers,” says one industry specialist.
That is a politely understated view. Another insurance specialist more directly conveys that, “Insurance contracts are a nearly impossible-to-solve puzzle for the average person.”
We noted that reality in a recent ERISA Law Center blog post. We stress on our website that insurers sometimes employ various strategies – including a retreat into layered language complexity and ambiguity – to drag out the insurance process or deny a claim.
Candidly, they have ample opportunity to do so when a policy can be a hundred pages or more in length and replete with fine-print riders and exclusions. Sometimes, notes one commentator, “there are exceptions to exceptions” in insurance contracts.
How can aggrieved policyholders and beneficiaries deal with such a challenge?
By getting help, and as quickly as possible after confronting a problem. The insurance industry is a specialized legal niche, and proven pro-claimant attorneys who have long operated effectively within it can provide badly needed help when a challenge arises.
As a contributor in a recent Forbes article on language issues linked with policies notes, an experienced insurance legal team “recognizes the nuances of how policies are constructed and formed,” and can use that knowledge to optimally benefit claimants.