Insult to Injury

AFTERWORD

207

ON DECEMBER 8, 2004, OUR FIRM WROTE A LETTER TO EACH of the forty-seven state insurance commissioners who were being asked to endorse the Spitzer Maine-Massachusetts-Tennessee agreement.

Gene Anderson had already pointed out that UnumProvident had set aside reserves of only $80 million for its projection of the amount that would be necessary to pay settlements on the reevaluated claims. Given that UnumProvident had targeted high-dollar claimants for terminations in the first place, Anderson noted that this meant its reserves estimate assumed that only a tiny fraction of the 215,000 claimants would wind up being paid. Either that, I thought, or the company wasn’t planning on offering much per claim.

In our letter we asked the forty-seven ...