It’s not the Shooting…it’s the Reaction

Attorneys spend a lot of time and money on focus groups. They want to see what people—like the people who will be chosen as jurors—really feel about a certain issue.

There’s a whole polling industry designed to find out how prospective voters feel about issues and candidates.

But the results of focus groups and polling leave some room for both imagination and doubt.

The recent election removed all doubt about who the majority of Americans wanted as their President.

And the public’s reaction to insurance companies after Luigi Mangione shot Brian Thompson makes it abundantly clear how Americans feel about insurance companies.

A murderer has been lionized because Americans hate insurance companies so much.

It’s not just people on the fringes. It’s regular people. And their friends. And family. And doctors.

In the distant past, insurance companies included arbitration clauses in every UIM policy. Why? Because they didn’t want to face juries.

But then the make-up of juries changed. Juries started to get tight-fisted. Jurors lost empathy. And in response insurance companies started eliminating arbitration clauses. The juries they once feared were siding with them and against the common man.

That’s all changed. As it says in the Bible: “Beat your plowshares into swords and your pruning hooks into spears.” That’s what’s happening now.

If I were running an insurance company I’d be revising the delay, deny, depose mantra.