A Modern Day Protection Racket-Geico And Their Gang Of Lawyers
As anyone following the legal battles in which I have been busily engaged in the state of New Jersey for the last three years, there has been a suspiciously coordinated attack from both the media and the medical malpractice ambulance chasers. An article published in November 2013 in the local rag, the Bergen Record, by the ‘veteran’ doctor hating journalist, Lindy Washburn, brought significant attention to the frivolous lawsuit filed in federal court by a US auto insurance company called oddly Geico, a reptile that lives in the crevices of the desert mountains. Regardless the 120-page falsehood laden document was dismissed from the federal court on December 6th 2014 for failure to produce credible evidence and more embarrassingly for the Geico lawyers a complete absence of any credible argument.
Lindy Washburn and her cohorts at the local rag felt it adequately relevant to advertise this baseless action in their six thousand word piece in the November 17th issue of the struggling Bergen Record, in an obvious attempt to paint me in the worst possible light. The quality of the ‘investigative’ journalism was to say the least lacking in the most rudimentary appearances of a balanced piece of journalism and it therefore is of absolutely no surprise that this ‘veteran’ journalist has completely ignored the fact that the lawsuit has been dismissed. The question most reasonable fair-minded readers would pose is why she and the paper have failed miserably in their duty to report these pieces of news. Could it be they have their own political agenda and have used the privilege of print to further their own cause?
Geico is an American company that provides insurance to motorists should they be involved in an accident with the promise that they will cover both the medical expenses and car reparation costs. This, as I have stated in a previous article, is the furthest scenario from the actual course of events in which they will find every excuse to deny payment. This fraudulent white collaresque crime has been allowed to flourish in New Jersey as a consequence of a weak and morally corrupt state government, whose department of banking and insurance enjoy a sinisterly cozy relationship with the executives of Geico. It is the citizens of New Jersey that suffer the financial insults of this conspiracy by paying the highest auto insurance premiums in the entire US.
A well conceived fact about the faceless Geico executives is that they get paid in excess of ten million dollars a year and use this money to fund their lavish lifestyles and contribute monies to any politician that will do their corrupt bidding in the statehouse in Trenton. As an outsider that grew up in London I find it incredulous that the descendants of a people who stood up to British tyranny, do absolutely nothing to confront this modern day version of mob like extortion. It should not be the case that the motorists of New Jersey are forced under penalty of law to pay exorbitant insurance fees to the fat cats of the insurance industry and in this case particularly Geico.
When a patient is injured in an auto accident they invariably require some form of medical care to assist their rehabilitation towards recovery and return to work. This service, naturally, costs money and it is the persistent denial of payment from Geico, despite the fact that they have received substantial premiums from their clients, that makes this situation intolerable. However the tragic element to this whole debacle is the lack of political will and or muscle to obligate this carrier to honor its contractual obligations. As a physician it is difficult to witness the pain and suffering an injured patient experiences after an accident and even more frustrating to know that are effective therapeutic options, which the Geico adjusters illogically deny.
Part of the overall business strategy of this socially irresponsible company is their policy of routinely denying care in the hope that both the physician and the patient will quietly disappear into the painful distant. Their actuarial consultants have calculated it is worth the effort to argue, cajole, and even lie to their clients with the ultimate goal being the maximization of their financial bottom line and Wall Street stock price. This is simply not right and in my opinion the federal government should send a few of the more culpable executives to the same big house as ex Enron executives Jeff Sterling and the now deceased Ken Lay. Their conduct is nothing more than a mob tactic in which their representations of liability coverage are predicated on the payment of ‘protection’ money.
The recently dismissed lawsuit should attract an equivalent amount of tabloid chatter, which if it does not, will simply confirm the vacuosness of the desperate modern day journalist struggling to compete with the citizen writers enabled by the communications revolution. The majority of print publications are on the brink of closure and for Lindy Washburn to devote an amount of print coverage to a simple and unassuming doctor from the old country tells a tale of journalistic desperation. The correct and morally responsible act for this individual would be to now write as extensive a story about the dismissal of the Geico lawsuit and maybe even attempt to worm her way into interviewing the faceless CEO.