Claiming Casualty
I recently wrote about the ethical dilemma I face with regard to my new television, which got somehow gouged on its main 85” screen in two small spots. I suppose I could go forward and just not worry about the damage since it doesn’t completely disrupt my viewing pleasure, but it is an expensive new TV and I would rather it be put right, so I am going down the path to try to get value out of the various protection plans I have on the TV. I figure I have three avenues for insurability with regard to the damage. The first is whatever coverage I have from Best Buy, where I purchased the TV and from whom I have a membership plan and Geek Squad subscription for repairs and service. They tout a feature of their membership as being a “product protection” feature which supposedly covers the items I purchase from them and get installed by them for three years. These places all hard-sell their extended protection plans, but I never buy them. This incident occurred within days of buying the set, so that should be irrelevant. I started by looking up my product protection coverage plan online. It is a long document that uses all the usual legalese but seems to come out squarely on the side that I am covered for accidental damage to the unit. The only confusing seems to reside in what is deemed to be damage from “handling”. It does not specify handling by whom, so I imagine that will be their coverage shield. Sure enough, when I called and spoke to the store manager, the only person supposedly authorized to discuss claims on the product protection plan (they probably held a special seminar that he attended on how to avoid having to pay out under the plan), he threw everything in the book at me. He started by saying the they do not cover TVs even though the plan makes no such exemption. Then he said that he had looked at the installer photos and saw no damage from installation (I suspect this was BS and that an attempt to be shown those photos would fall short of such evidentiary standards). The bottom line was that he said unequivocally that I was not covered and that they NEVER have paid out a claim for this sort of damage. He seemed very resolute, but I made an appointment to see him anyway.
My next stop was at American Express. I recalled that my Platinum membership entitles me to 90-day purchase protection. So, I went online to AMEX and looked up my card benefits. They list 49 benefits, and buried at number 40 was the Purchase Protection Plan which “can” protect purchases from “accidentally damaged, stolen, or lost, for up to 90 days”, but then again “coverage limits apply”. What I was pleased to see was that it covered items up to $10,000 with a total annual coverage of $50,000. This gave me some hope since my claim would be for $2,484.24. So, I went about filing the claim online only to find that at the crucial claim information input section there was a glitch which did not allow me to upload the most important information. So I called the suggested service number and got a very polite European man who was a claims specialist. He was happy to help me file the claim. In the course of the call he did a good deal of sympathizing and saying that he had seen similar problems with Best Buy. I got the distinct feeling that his mission in life was to find another insurer to scrape this claim off onto and Best Buy was a great candidate for that role. In fact, when he recited the filing information, he very casually said that the damage had occurred on installation. I corrected him and he very affably agreed to amend the comment a sort of “nice try” attitude. The most encouraging aspect of the call was that he ended it by promising to send me and email and thanking me for my 47 years of American Express Platinum membership. He gets it. For 47 years I have paid in $400 per year for my membership benefit, not to mention the literally millions of dollars of purchases I have made and the 4-5% merchant fees they have garnered thereon. I figure that AMEX has, over the years, made over $500,000 from my account and they certainly know that. They also know that I have never once made such a purchase protection plan claim so its not like I’m a scammer.
AMEX has sent me the email with the claim filing forms needed. There is an entire section on repair estimate, which they must realize I will have to go to Best Buy their Geek Squad to get filled out. It actually requires a technician’s signature with a diagnostic repair estimate. That means that even if I wanted to avoid going back to Best Buy to dispute this claim, I will have to do it anyway. Therefore, exactly as AMEX would want, I am printing off the terms and conditions of the Best Buy plan to take into them for that review and fully understanding that I will likely be forced to simply use it to cajole them to fill out the repair estimate, which I am sure they would otherwise want no part of. The other thing about the AMEX form that is worth noting is the section about my homeowners property and casualty coverage. They ask for the insurer, the policy number and the deductible amount. I recently renewed with Farmers Insurance for my homeowners and as it turned out, the whole wildfire risk issue had driven the policy premiums up so high that I was forced to jigger the deductible upward just to not feel completely hosed by the premium increase. I was, effectively, forced to put my homeowners coverage into the catastrophic risk category where I would probably only ever use it if the whole damn house burns down. Normal roof leaks and miscellaneous other acts of God wouldn’t tend to exceed the very high deductible I now enjoy. Bad news on that for AMEX since I can rightly claim that hat is not an alternative avenue available for them to scrape off this claim, which is clearly what they continue to look for. I will bet that they will try nonetheless. Insurance payment protocols involve lots of one-off negotiations between carriers who know the blame game better than anyone. In fact, it wouldn’t shock me if the AMEX insurance people carve this claim up between Farmers, Best Buy and themselves on the theory that a negotiated solution is better than a court case, which is where all of these insurers spend most of their lives.
So, between Best Buy, AMEX and Farmers, I am hoping to get a check from one of them for this damage to my new TV. In the meantime I will keep watching it and trying to ignore the two little gouges as much as possible while I await what will undoubtedly be a protracted settlement process. The worst outcome for me would be if they say they will agree to have it repaired and then I will be without a TV for God knows how long. The best case is that I will get a check and then be forced to decide if I buy a new TV or just take a crayon to the scratch and try to find a way to live with it.