The Elimination In Pennsylvania Automobile Insurance Policies Of Mandatory Arbitration For Uninsured And Underinsured Motorist Claims – What Does This Mean? – An Experienced Lawyer Speaks Out
A few years ago, certain interests in the powerful insurance industry requested that the Insurance Commissioner of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania eliminate the inclusion in automobile insurance polices of mandatory arbitration for uninsured and underinsured motorist claims. In the past, if the claimant could not agree as to the fair value of his claim with his or her insurance company then the case would proceed to a mandatory arbitration whereupon the insured would select an arbitrator, the insurance company would select an arbitrator and a neutral would be selected by the two arbitrators and if a neutral could not be agreed upon then the neutral arbitrator would be appointed by the Court upon the filing of a motion by the plaintiffs’ attorney. Insurance companies claimed that this process was unfair and even went so far as to suggest that it was corrupt and therefore changed the policy language in Pennsylvania insurance policies.
This experienced Philadelphia uninsured and underinsured motorist insurance attorney argues that the limitation of mandatory arbitration is resulting in voluminous numbers of uninsured and underinsured claims clogging up the Court of Common Pleas and Federal Courts in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and resulting in an unnecessary expense to taxpayers and in fact, costing litigants more in litigation costs rather than proceeding through a less formal process of mandatory arbitration.
In fact, the President Judge of the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia County criticizes the insurance industry’s proposal to eliminate mandatory arbitration in uninsured and underinsured motorist disputes for this very reason. The President Judge concluded that if large volumes of UM/UIM matters are shifted to the courts of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and courts of Common Pleas in Philadelphia, the entire system of justice will suffer. Judges will be overburdened by the increased case load, members of the bar will find themselves inundated with pre-trial and trial matters and most significantly, the parties will experience litigation delays due to the crowded court calendars when previous to this, an uninsured or underinsured motorist case could move rather quickly and informally through the arbitration process. The extra costs to the civil budget in these recessionary times adversely impacts all parties involved.
Under the mandatory arbitration system, each party paid the expenses of their respective arbitrator and shared the expenses of the neutral arbitrator equally.
In reality, the uninsured and underinsured motorist lawyers of Reiff and Bily have been aggressively representing the rights of uninsured and underinsured motorists since 1979 and in fact believe that the continuous cost, and deny, delay, and defend posture taken by the insurance companies contain many elements of bad faith in failing to recognize and respect the fiduciary relationship between the company and their insured. We are currently proceeding to court on a major case with catastrophic injuries where the insurance company in the formal court setting has only offered a minimal amount of settlement well beneath the true value of comparable injuries despite the fact that the adjuster agrees the claim is worth well in excess of the amount offered by the company. Certainly it comes as no surprise that the insurance company involved was named as one of the ten worst insurance companies in America by The American Association for Justice. In cases such as these, and countless others, the name of the game for insurance companies is deny, delay and defend and in fact, do anything at all to avoid paying claims.
Insurance companies continue to put profits over policyholders, continue to throw roadblocks in the path of injured consumers, and continue to employ a hardball, boxing glove strategy against their own policyholders.
