Records: Insurer Automatically Investigated HIV-Positive Policyholders
(Washington, DC) -- Court records reveal a health insurance company had a standard procedure of targeting policyholders with HIV. The Fortis insurance company, now known as Assurant Health, had a computer program that targeted every policyholder diagnosed with HIV. Those policyholders would be subject to an automatic fraud investigation to seek any reason at all for revoking their policy. The findings come from a 2002 case involving 17-year-old Jerome Mitchell. He sued after his insurance policy was revoked when he was diagnosed with HIV. In 2004, a jury ordered Assurant Health to pay Mitchell 15-million dollars for wrongly revoking his health insurance policy. The reward was reduced on appeal to ten-million dollars. |