Bad faith set-up.

• Author: Krup, Steve
• Position: Letters - Letter to the editor

"The Good Faith, Bad Faith, and Ugly Set-up of Insurance Claims Settlement" (February) is informative, but fails in its attempt to justify a law to further hamper civil actions against insurers which have failed to settle valid claims. The cited cases, involving delayed payment notwithstanding unquestioned liability for catastrophic loss far exceeding policy limits (consider, a spouse and child killed by drunk driver whose policy limit was $20,000), serve only to reinforce the importance of restraining insurer abuses and forcing prompt payments.

Worse is the faulty logic involved in defending insurer practices of delaying payment and requiring claimants to agree to overly broad releases, or as the authors write "disagreeing over the specific release language." While it could be questioned whether insurers should delay payment for undisputed losses exceeding policy limits for any release--proof of policy limit payment being available even in the absence of a written release--there clearly is no justification for delays to negotiate extraneous release terms, like confidentiality agreements.

It is an interesting article, but the citations and reasoning not only fail to support its conclusion, but show a need for stricter scrutiny of insurer's practices. The public interest would be better served by stricter rules governing insurance company practices.

STEVE KRUP, Cooper City

The alleged insurance bad faith article in the February Bar Journal was perhaps the most one-sided and anti-consumer article to grace your pages. The two insurance defense attorneys who authored the piece say they want to "level the uneven playing field that now exists." It is uneven, but only because insurance companies wrongfully subject their insureds to excess or punative damages awards. They pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to top medical experts to give extremely biased opinions on injury or causation. They routinely make offers of less than medical bills in many righteous cases. They force injured folks to sue even to obtain modest justice. They spend millions on false advertising about a nonexistant tort crisis. They wrongfully accuse claimants of fraud. They hire captive law firms whose loyalty is to the insurance company before the insured. They donate millions to influence the legislature.

The case cited of DeLaune v. Liberty Mut. Ins. Co., 314 So. 2d 601 (Fla. 4th DCA. 1975), clearly shows the courts are already enforcing a requirement of good faith...