CHARLESTON – A woman is suing Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and Liberty Mutual Fire Insurance Company for refusing to pay medical bills.

Kimberly Shirkey has submitted bills and records for medical expenses exceeding the amount of the medical payments coverage to the defendants, according to a complaint filed May 15 in Kanawha Circuit Court.

Shirkey claims the defendants have refused to pay the bills.

Liberty’s conduct is outrageous, intentional and in bad faith and in violation of the West Virginia Unfair Trade Practices Act, according to the suit.

Shirkey claims the defendant’s action in handling her claims have been willful, wanton, reckless, malicious, wrongful and were undertaken by the defendants in bad faith and with total disregard of their duties and obligations under West Virginia law and the regulations of the Insurance Commissioner of West Virginia, by which the defendants are bound.

As a direct and proximate result of the defendants’ breach of contract, Shirkey suffered monetary damages and substantial aggravation, annoyance, inconvenience and severe emotional distress, according to the suit.

Shirkey is seeking compensatory damages. She is being represented by Paul M. Stroebel of Stroebel & Johnson PLLC.

The case has been assigned to Circuit Judge Paul Zakaib Jr.

Kanawha Circuit Court case number: 13-C-959

Here Comes Another Round of Delay’s, Denials and Layoffs!

Boston-based Liberty Mutual reported Thursday its net income fell 30.7 percent to $318 million for its 2013 first quarter, compared to $459 million income reported during the prior year first quarter.

That’s on top of the 234 Million 4th quarter loss!

The company’s quarterly underwriting and operating results both improved from prior year. But financial results were pushed down by realized investment losses which the company said would reverse during the remainder of the year.

In other words: Our business is fine, we just hope people are too stupid to read between the lines

These losses are closely followed by more delays and denial of claims. More savings can be achieved through more consolidations and layoffs. Liberty is shrinking and growing smaller by the day.

Read the rest of the article from the Insurance Journal Here…

Liberty Mutual Holding Co. Inc. reported a net loss of $234 million for the fourth quarter of 2012, compared with $285 million net income during the same period a year earlier, the Boston-based insurer announced.

http://www.businessinsurance.com/article/20130301

This comes as we are monitoring slow pay and no pay complaints from Hurricane Sandy claims from all across the East Coast. Liberty Mutual had already been aggressively dropping policyholders on the coasts for the previous 5 years. We expect Liberty Mutual to spread out their losses over the next 4 quarters, the main reason behind the slow payment to no payment of claims.

FEMA has proposed larger 100-year flood zones, adding 65,000 structures to the area where the annual risk of a flood is 1 percent. The full map is here – Proposed Map

We are investigating whether or not Liberty Mutual has patterned the map they were using to pull out of these exact flood zones now listed on this map. As we had access to similar maps back in 2007, we know Liberty Mutual was pulling out of certain areas. Those Liberty Mutual policyholders still in these new flood zones may now be getting denied, pushing them onto FEMA claims.

Stay vigilant. If you are a Liberty Mutual policyholder, it is inevitable you will become a victim of their fraudulent claims practices.

We remember the days when Liberty Mutual was an A+ rated company.

WE TOOK THAT RATING AND SQUASHED IT!

That right folks, when we started this project, Liberty Mutual was a rock solid, A+ rated company by the Better Business Bureau. We couldn’t believe it. We, former employees of the company, who knew Liberty Mutual was blatantly ripping off people, small business’s, medical providers and most anyone they did business with, was not worthy of this distinction and we just had to warn the public.

We’ve been up 3 years and have managed to steer almost 1000 complaints towards the Better Business Bureau site in Massachusetts.

We’re also proud of the fact that many people are getting together and collaborating on their complaints against Liberty Mutual using the comments section of the site. SO many people have made new friends in their struggle against this evil company.

Keep it up everyone! We’ll be around until Liberty Mutual goes out of business, or it’s upper management is ultimately jailed.

This is a repost from the BostonGlobe where we dump a lot of our information. :p

It’s amazing what arrives over the transom some days. Amid the political hate mail (“You’re a real looser,” was one of my recent favorites) and the candidates’ fund-raising pitches and the dozens of offers to have extra cash by the weekend, one arrived this week that stood very much apart.

It came from a lawyer in a place called Campbell County, Kentucky, which sounds like a place that only horses could love, but I may be wrong about that. The subject said, “Liberty Mutual,” and the first line ­offered an expression of thanks – to me.

Hmm, Liberty Mutual. Good company, especially if you happened to be the recently departed chief executive officer, Ted ­Kelly, who received an annual pay package worth nearly $50 million for four consecutive years, or the current CEO, who dropped $4.5 million to renovate his 1,335 square-foot office when he took over last year. To be fair, that included his personal bathroom with the carved stone shower, and the private gym with glass brick walls.

Of course, there’s also the fleet of five luxury, long-range, corporate jets housed in a state-of-the-art hangar at Hanscom Field, planes that seem to spend an inordinate amount of time soaring toward Florida, the Caribbean, Hawaii, and the Pacific coast, hotspots, yes, but not for insurance.

Remember the “accounting issues?” in describing Kelly’s pay? The “security reasons?” in explaining the no comments about the flights? How about the “phantom stock” that resulted in very real bank deposits? All at a mutual company, owned by the policyholders who never get dividends.

And who wants to forget the fact that the top nine executives were paid a total of $108 million one recent year. Or the company directors, each of whom receives $200,000 annually to valiantly shout, “Yes!” at every executive pay hike proposal, all while sitting on each other’s corporate boards, golfing at each other’s country clubs, and buying estates in each other’s ­vacation towns.

But where were we? Oh, yes, the lawyer, in Kentucky, writing a thank you note.

The attorney is Jeffrey Sanders, and in the e-mail and a subsequent phone call, he described his client, James Demetre, as a self-made businessman who grew up above a fish market and now owns a successful company that sells electronics to department stores in Kentucky and parts of Ohio.

Demetre and his wife had acquired a vacant piece of land from his in-laws that, 50 years earlier, housed a gas station. The under­ground tanks were removed in 1998.

A few years ago, a neighbor sued, saying that toxic petroleum fumes had been flowing into their house from Demetre’s lot and injuring their six young children. Demetre turned it over to his insurer, Indiana Insurance, which is described on its website as “a Liberty Mutual company.”

Indiana Insurance immediately got very aggressive. The problem is, it didn’t get aggres­sive with the neighbors that claimed, questionably, to be poisoned. No, it sued Demetre, charging that he must have known there was a problem with his land.

“They tried to grind him into dust and debt,” said Sanders.

Demetre, though, would not fold quietly. He sued Indiana Insurance back, accusing them of breach of contract, and for the next three-plus years, company and client wrangled in court as legal fees soared and revelations were uncovered that made the insurer look, well, not very good. My personal ­favorite: The Liberty Mutual claims adjuster on the Demetre claim had a track record of no payments in 72 percent of his toxic tort cases. They may build a statue of him in their new headquarters.

Now we get to the “thank you” part of the Sanders note. Sanders was preparing for trial this past spring when he came across a series of columns about Liberty Mutual in this very space: the planes, the salaries, the office makeovers, the excess of it all.

“It helped me focus,” said Sanders. “It assured me that there’s something there. There’s a reason for the behavior in this case. It starts to make sense when you go back and see some of the excesses at the highest level of the corporation.”

So he pressed, and pressed hard. Ultimately, Indiana Insurance settled the original suit with Demetre’s neighbor for $165,000, a relatively paltry sum, given the legal warfare it caused.

In late September, Demetre and Indiana Insurance went to trial. At least one Liberty Mutual attorney from Boston sat in the courtroom. At one point, when a witness mentioned Ted Kelly’s name, Sanders casually said something like, “I’ve read about him.”

“I almost got knocked down, literally, almost knocked down, when the defense counsel ran past me to object,” Sanders ­recalled Thursday.

The trial lasted eight days. There were so many objections from the Liberty Mutual legal team that Sanders wondered aloud in court if they’d have to replace the new carpet.

The deliberations lasted about 7 hours. The 12-member jury came back Monday with a verdict against Indiana Insurance and an award for Demetre in the amount of – drumroll here, please — $3.425 million, the second highest award ever given in the county, with the highest level of punitive damages.

Beyond that, Sanders can put in for legal fees, which are well over half a million dollars.

There’s no indication whether Liberty Mutual plans to pay up or appeal. “We’re evaluating our options,” said company spokesman John Cusolito.

It’s funny how perspectives change. In 2010, Liberty Mutual was tossing around pay packages of at least $4 million to nine different executives because, hey, why not? Ted Kelly spent four years making nearly a million a week and, by all indi­cations, makes more than $3 million in annual pension payments now. It costs nearly $100,000 to fly one of their Gulfstreams to Hawaii, which they did often.

But when it’s time to pay a policyholder a $3.4 million court-ordered judgment because of the company’s own negligence, it suddenly seems like a ridiculously large sum of money to them.

James Demetre, by the way, is 72 years old, and his wife just had open heart surgery, meaning it probably doesn’t even matter to him that the award will start earning 12 percent annual interest, or more than $400K a year (roughly two days pay for Kelly) as of today.

“The money is secondary,” said Sanders, a line never before uttered on the executive floor of Liberty Mutual. “It’s about standing up to large corporations that don’t follow the rules. They were a corporate bully too large to care, and they did everything possible to punish James Demetre for standing up to them.”

Wouldn’t it be great if, ­instead of Liberty Mutual appealing the judgment, we could appeal all their excess executive pay?

There are plenty of people now working this blog and actively seeking ways to address their grievances with Liberty Mutual. In the Spirit of Occupy Wall Street, we who administer this site, would like to state the following:

To The People Of The World:

We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power. Exercise your right to peaceably assemble, occupy public space, create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone. To all who take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all the resources at our disposal. Join us and make your voices heard.

September 29th, 2011

This is the original call to action. You are all able to do something about your situations. Check the comments section of this site for starters. There are some great ideas as to how we can all stop corporate corruption, especially at Liberty Mutual. Find the corporations that do business with them and convince them to terminate their contracts with Liberty Mutual. Cut off their funding. That is the only way to stop them.

Make Your Voices Heard! 

A new culture is starting to form in Liberty Mutual. It’s a culture that may actually reboot the company but would require getting rid of the horrible management hired over the past few years. Centralizing power fosters immoral behavior and Liberty Mutual is the poster child of a company who’s corporate culture has run amuck. Wake up employees! Overthrow your immoral managers and manage yourselves. If you don’t you will not survive. Here is your wakeup call:

General Strike! May 1st 2012

Over the years we have heard back from 1000′s of Liberty Mutual policyholders and have successfully established a pattern. Liberty Mutual, as with every insurance company, will take your money and you will never see it again. You will be given a false sense of security, you will hear stories of responsibility, once in a while a claim will actually be paid…  but we have successfully proven Liberty Mutual is one of the most corrupt companies on the planet.

As the Class Action lawsuit gets bogged down in red tape, we encourage everyone to join up with your local Occupy Movement. We are no longer standing up for the atrocities of companies like Liberty Mutual. We are tearing down the whole system.

Employees of Liberty Mutual, you will be held accountable as accessories to crimes against humanity. Stop denying claims. Start honoring your claims in Good Faith. After May 1st you can no longer hide behind your leaders, the corporate criminals who order you to “Cut Costs”, and then claim you were just following orders. You will be treated as war criminals.

This blogging community will no longer stand behind any Liberty Mutual employee. If you deny a claim in bad faith we will protest in front of your workplaces. The worldwide struggle will be bought to your doorstep. Think hard before denying a claim that was made in good faith.

A General Strike has been Called!

For those of you who have have claims denied… pursue justice! Take to the Streets! Take down these corporations that refuse to act in good faith. Our stand is now being taken. The war has just begun. Find your local Occupy Movement and join in the General Strike! General Strikes have been called in every major city. Find your closest one and support them.

This is a Worldwide Struggle and we are tearing down the system. Liberty Mutual no longer belongs on this planet.

Our seven month plan is based on a simple premise: When criminal laws are egregiously violated, the guilty parties should face appropriate punishment. Liberty Mutual is a target. Here’s the plan:

Month One: Read all 50 states Attorney General reports regarding corporate fraud in the insurance industry, public records of past insurance fraud committed by insurance companies and review all insurance department complaints from across the nation.

Month Two: Meet with the Insurance Department Fraud Divisions of all 50 states. Specifically obtain the names of all the Liberty Mutual Officers involved in fraud alleged by each individual state, obtain lawyers and notaries names whose behavior, as cited in the Insurance Department reports or otherwise known to the investigators, represent clear and unquestionable criminal violations. Add to this list other individuals who have similarly demonstrated or testified to behavior unquestionably constituting criminal acts, as indicated by the public records of these insurance department cases reviewed in month one.

Month Three: Indict all of the individuals on the list compiled on Month two.

Month Four: Indict banks and financial institutions who conspired with Liberty Mutual on criminal charges where criminal behavior by employees (as demonstrated by month three indictments) appears to be endemic. The Justice Department guidelines for prosecuting firms include: (1) the pervasiveness of such activity, (2) the compliance procedures in place, (3) attempts by the corporation to end bad behavior, and (4) cooperation with federal investigators. In 2008, the Justice Department adopted a policy of accepting “deferred prosecutions,” involving agreements to change corporate behavior without damaging innocent third parties through prosecution.

Corporations receive the benefits of “legal persons,” as demonstrated by Citizens United. But they must also bear the responsibilities of these privileges. A reading of these insurance department reports, and other public records, suggests several banks along with Liberty Mutual should clearly be prosecuted.

Month 5: Discuss plea bargains with indicted lower-level officials in return for cooperating in investigations of higher-level officials.

Month 6: Consider plea bargains with indicted Insurance Companies, which require the removal of all remaining officers and directors who were serving when egregious criminal activity occurred, as well as senior officials who were in a position to exercise appropriate supervisory responsibility but chose to look the other way.

Month 7: Indict any senior Liberty Mutual officials implicated by new cooperative testimony resulting from activities on day five. Adopt and announce a policy that future criminal violations will be prosecuted in a similar fashion.

What is particularly disturbing is that a look at the evidence already in the public domain (much less what investigators already know) shows that none of the actions discussed above are entirely absurd. The purpose of prosecution not simply punishment. It acts to deter further illegal activity and to restore public confidence in our system of governance. The nation desperately needs both of these benefits today.

Moreover, these ongoing, almost certainly criminal activities are ultimately dangerous threats to our economy, the success of capitalism, and our democracy. In his column on MF Global, Joe Nocera noted that “customers need to be able to trust” the laws protecting their money. “Otherwise, the markets can’t function.”

Today, as in the era of FDR, we must send a message to the financial community that illegal behavior will not be tolerated. By prosecuting blatant felonies now, we will deter future misbehavior and begin the process of recreating a fair society where equal justice prevails.