Car insurer Geico may have to pay $5m after woman contracts STI in a vehicle | Hacker News Reader

Car insurer Geico may have to pay $5m after woman contracts STI in a vehicle

bbc.com

12 pointsacqbu8 comments

That must be a great policy. I'm glad I have Geico.

Geico didn't think it was a great policy; they said it didn't cover the claim, and then the panel of judges said they failed to defend their policyholder, so tough, pay up.

And Geico is still going to appeal in a federal lawsuit.

Geico might have to update its exclusions.

On the one hand...this makes the old "McDonalds, hot coffee, and $2.7M" story sound perfectly sane and reasonable by comparison.

On the other hand...over the years, I've had insurance agents describe to me all sorts of nonsensical and freakish situations which an insurance policy (that they wanted to sell me) would cover. It seems pretty plausible that Geico's policy includes General Liability (an incredibly broad term) coverage for bad things which happen inside the insured motor vehicle, injury resulting from poor judgement in the vicinity of the insured motor vehicle, etc...and Geico's policy-writing geeks failed to exclude this situation.

It appears the award was determined by an arbitrator, and the appeal determined by judges, so I'm not sure it's at all similar to the McDonald's case.

It sounds like another example of big corporations forcing arbitration on customers and then pulling out all the stops to weasel out when they don't like a verdict.

The McDonald's story seems very reasonable even without any comparison.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...

But there is no comparison, is there? It's a completely unrelated flamewar.

The McDonalds hot coffee case is absolutely sane and reasonable. The woman who was injured only sought $20,000 to cover her expenses due to the injury. McDonalds refused to settle before trial, where a jury found McDonalds 80% at fault and awarded the large damages. These were scaled back by a judge, the decision was appealed by McDonalds, and they settled out of court before the appeal case.

But yes they have successfully run a smear campaign to make you think that a greedy woman went after millions of dollars for an injury that she alone caused, which is a wildly inaccurate summation of the situation.

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