LOS ANGELES, California — Survivors of the Eaton Fire in Altadena and Pasadena have organized protests against State Farm, the largest home insurer in the state, for allegedly “lowballing” estimates of damage.
Joy Chen, a former deputy mayor of Los Angeles, helped form the Eaton Fire Survivors Network, after helping to guiding her community’s initial evacuation and response to the fires when local officials failed.
According to Chen, State Farm appears to have a standard practice of “lowballing” estimates of damage. Individual adjusters who visit damaged properties in disaster zones, she says, come up with estimates of compensation for policyholders, but those numbers are revised downward radically by the company before being presented. The goal is to exert pressure on financially troubled policyholders to accept lower amounts.
Chen says that State Farm has carried out this practice in the recent L.A. fires, as well as in previous disasters.
Chen’s group has brought together thousands of fire survivors and is pressing for change, though protests, petition drives, and research into the “delta” between adjusters’ initial estimates and State Farm’s final offers.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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