First off, if your insurance policy is 40 pages long then count yourself fortunate. We have had occasion to review commercial policies that range into the hundreds of pages, but don’t feel sorry for us (like that would ever happen—we’re insurance agents!) But why are they so loooong? There are a lot of reasons, but the MAIN reason is that insurance policies are contracts of adhesion. Before your eyes glaze over let me sum it up in three sentences: 1.) An insurance policy is a contract where there are two parties (you and the insurer) but only ONE party (the insurer) got to write the contract. 2.) Since the insurer wrote it, they got to set all the rules and terms and you didn’t. 3.) Since they set the rules and you didn’t, any time there is any question about the rules YOU are given the benefit of the doubt.

Getting the picture? You don’t have to be a sociologist to see why insurance policies are so long. It’s because if you give someone (client or insurer) an inch they will try to take a mile. We have an old policy from the 1800’s on the wall in our office. It is one page. I love this policy and I hate it. I love the simplicity and the nostalgia it invokes but I hate the fact that it hangs there taunting me as I try to explain subrogation, replacement cost, coinsurance, proximate cause, and countless other legal doctrines and insurance clauses to the tortured souls before me.

You see, insurance policies USED to be one page. But people are people. And somewhere sometime some guy figured out how to get something covered that the insurance company never intended to cover because their wording was just a bit too vague. So they tightened it up a bit and added a few more sentences (insurance companies are like people too, only worse). As this cycle continued itself over the decades policies went from one page to five, to twenty, to “who knows where it will end?” To be fair it isn’t all just self-interest at work. Insurers really do want to be up-front and have everything in black and white so there are no surprises. They WANT you to know ahead of time what they will and will not cover and they WANT you to know exactly how it will work. The “clearer” they make things, the longer the policies become.

And that brings us to the answer to the second question. Do you really need to read that doorstop of a policy? It depends. Do you want to know what will happen to you or are you okay with a few surprises? A lot of the answer also depends on trust. Do you trust that you explained yourself well to the person who sold the policy to you? Do you trust that they understood? Do you trust that they know what they are doing and delivered a policy that covers what you said you want covered? We like to think we are trustworthy. We listen, we do what we say we will do, and we give you what you ask for. That being said, it really is wise to read, or at least survey every contact into which you enter. You never know what incorrect assumptions you may be making until you have all the facts in front of you and you very probably will find that you are getting a little more in that policy than you even thought. We also find that clients who read their policies are more likely to know when to call us with a claim.

This may not be the news you wanted to hear, but we recommend that you look your policy over when it arrives and then call us with questions on anything you don’t understand. It has a table of contents and bullet points and is probably shorter than most chapters of any book you were assigned in high school English. If you must, just grit your teeth and imagine you are plowing through a chapter of The Scarlet Letter, and as you read you can be pleasantly reminded of how far our legal system has come over the years!