Value 360 Insurance Software
Has technology made our lives better? The answer to that question is, as it is with so many others, “It Depends.”
There are pluses and minuses to many of the technological advances that have taken place over the past twenty years of so. Texting is an incredibly quick way of communicating, but it turns out that many of us have very little of importance to say to one another. There is also the strange phenomenon of people ignoring a crowded room to send texts, not to mention the unfortunate side effect of texting while driving, which often leads to fatal car accidents.
The availability of information is amazing as well. If you want to find out the population of the Netherlands, or the lyrics to your favorite song, or the capital of New Zealand, or any fact that you need at all, you can simply go to Google and have the information that you need in seconds. That’s the plus. The minus is that sometimes the information isn’t always accurate.
Try going to Google and typing in “Barack Obama” and “birth certificate.” This will lead you down a rabbit hole that seemingly has no end. Despite the fact that everyone knows that the President was born in Hawaii, despite the fact that he has made his birth certificate available for scrutiny, it is easy to get the wrong information out there on the internet.
While the speed in which you can access information is impressive, the accuracy levels are less so. Information is only worth something if it is accurate, and since there is nobody checking everything that is put on the internet, you have to be selective about where you get your information.
Technology isn’t perfect, and usually what makes it imperfect are the human beings that make and use it. For instance, if someone makes a calculator that causes every bit of addition or subtraction to come up with a rigged answer, that isn’t the calculators fault. It’s just doing what it was designed to do.
So we can’t really be mad at insurance company software. It was designed to minimize settlement offers and maximize profits. However, we can get mad at the insurance companies that use it.
Awhile back, we mentioned that there was software called “Colossus” that a lot of insurance companies were using, and still are to the best of our knowledge. It basically averages out the costs of an injury and then provides the insurance agent with an appropriate offer of a settlement. For instance, if a driver gets hit by another car and breaks his leg, the insurance agent would type in “Broken Leg” and get the average cost of fixing a broken leg in that area. Then he would offer the injury victim that amount. We know that sounds perfectly reasonable, but there are a lot of things wrong with this. In the first place, each injury is different and affects different people in different ways. There is no way to “average” the costs of any injury. Secondly, where are they getting these numbers? Since they won’t let anybody look at the workings of the software due to “trade secrecy concerns,” we have no idea if these are accurate averages, or averages with 30% shaved off, or just random numbers.
A similar incident is happening now. An insurance company in Florida has been using software called Value360, which according to a lawsuit being filed, has caused the value of homes to double. That might sound great, except these houses aren’t being valued for sale. They are being valued for insurance purposes, sometimes by as much as twice as what the home is actually worth. This is causing the insurance rates to skyrocket.
To give you an equivalent, let’s say you drive a 2001 Honda Accord with 140,000 miles on it. What Value360 is allegedly doing is saying that car is worth as much as a 2011 Honda Accord with 70,000 miles on it. All of a sudden, your car is worth more on paper, even though it clearly is not in real life. This allows the insurance company to charge you twice as much on your premium. So transfer this practice over to home ownership, and you have a sense of exactly how much of a sudden financial burden homeowners all over Florida are facing right now.
As we said earlier, if these allegations are true, we can’t blame the software. It’s simply filling its function. But if the people using the software are using it to purposely over-value homes, that’s practically stealing. We will be keeping an eye on this case as it progresses.
Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal consultation to those who have been injured due to the actions of others. If you or a loved one in Virginia, Maryland or Washington, D.C. has been hurt in an accident, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free personal injury case evaluation.
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