Public may get look at insurance e-mails

A judge may decide today whether the public can see the premium rollbacks some of the state’s largest insurers have promised to enact once lawmakers limit state residents’ ability to sue insurance companies.

For the last few weeks, plaintiff’s lawyers have been clamoring to see the specific promises Insurance Commissioner Jane Cline outlined in a series of e-mails to Brian Kastick, an aide to Gov. Joe Manchin, on Feb. 22 and 23.
“I think the public should know who’s going to get what,” said Al Karlin, a Morgantown lawyer who sued Cline for the promises she detailed in her e-mails.

So far, the Insurance Commission and the Manchin administration have managed to keep the insurance companies’ specific offers secret by blacking out numbers, words and whole sentences from copies of Cline’s e-mails obtained by Karlin and the Gazette through the Freedom of Information Act.

The Manchin administration says the details of the offers are not public information because they are trade secrets.
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Third-party bad-faith lawsuits are controversial. People use the cause of action to sue other people’s insurance companies for not settling with them in a fair, timely fashion. Business groups and insurers say the lawsuits hurt the state’s economy. Consumer groups and plaintiff’s lawyers say average citizens use the cause of action to protect themselves from being bullied by insurance companies.

http://wvgazette.com/section/News/2005033136