Tell the insurers to give up the “list” – a Democrat press editorial

Housing owners in communities hit by wild fire in recent years know the headaches of treatments with insurance companies too well. One of the most serious parties is the detail and documentation of everything that was in a house to convince an insurer to pay. California MPs should make life easier for people after losing their homes forbidding the “list”.

Unless their house has not burned, most people probably don’t know about the list. Insurance companies insist that people who submit requests offer an inventory of each lost article and what it was worth – of course, depreciated. Only then will the insurer begin to pay for these losses up to the value of the policy. If the level is lower than the coverage, the insured receives that smaller amount.

Ideally, each homeowner and would make his own list in a spare weekend and he would update him periodically, only in case.

In fact, few people go through the many hours of tiring cataloging, photographing and assigning values ​​to everything they have – every fork, plate, book, inheritance of the price and article of clothing. Then, when hitting disasters, he must try to produce an inventory from memory, scanning the backgrounds of photos for the proof that there was something and desperately looking for a receipt that shows the cost of a sofa bought a decade ago. It serves as a painful memory of everything they have lost and distract from many other tasks involved in recovery.

Ricardo Lara State Insurance Commissioner wants the legislator to ban the list. He proposed to ask the insurance companies to pay the full coverage in cases of total loss during a declared disaster. He looks at all the houses lost in Los Angeles, and the task that these homeowners have to endure now to be made whole.

As our former colleague Paul Gullixson wrote in a 2018 column“If the victims of the fire paid for $ 100,000 coverage, for example, for the contents of their house, why not pay them all? Why should we go through the pain of having to prove that they will come? “Why indeed.

In 2018, Senator Mike McGuire from Healdsburg and then-Sen. Bill Dodd from Napa entered an invoice This would have asked the insurers to pay 80% of the maximum limit without documentation. The intense lobby of the insurance industry has led to the disappearance of the draft law. However, under public pressure, insurers offered many victims 75% or another partial payment.

Even if Lara’s proposal goes on, they could have a better chance of becoming law. After years of canceled rates and policies, insurance companies are unpopular in California. Few people will cry for them if they have to do well a policy that someone has been paying for years.

Probably the law should go further. Prohibition of articles in all cases of total loss, not only when a disaster has been officially declared. No owner should browse the labyrinthine documents and remember each possession when their main concern is recovery and reconstruction. The current practice is both inefficient and unfair, forcing the victims to relive their trauma to a moment when compassion and quick response are the most necessary.

You can send letters to the editor to [email protected].