According
to a 2011 MSN Money-Zogby poll, nearly 30 percent called Farmers Insurance
customer service ‘poor,’ Auto
Insurance Blog reports.

The blog
goes on to point out Farmers drops customers, refuses claims and employs
unresponsive adjusters. State of Washington Insurance regulators intervened
because Farmers refused a claim because an at-fault driver had road rage.

Insurance
regulators in Washington state even had to intervene with Farmers when Ethel
Adams, a 60-year-old woman left in a coma and seriously injured after a
multi-vehicle crash, had her claim denied when Farmers decided the other driver
acted intentionally, claiming an intentional act is not accident.

Eventually,
after intense public pressure and the threat of suit from the insurance
commissioner, Farmers finally did pay for Adams’s nearly $3 million in medical bills. In
2006 the ‘Ethel Adams Bill’ was passed.

It changed
the definition of an accident to be any occurrence that is unexpected and
unintended from the perspective of the insured.

However,
Adams’s battle to make her insurance company answer for their actions did not
stop there.  Farmers refused to apologize and continued to justify its
actions. 

Incredibly,
Adams pursued a bad faith lawsuit against Farmers, but under Washington law,
her remedies were limited.  Farmers remained unrepentant because it knew
any financial penalty would be nominal. 

Farmers
argued that she was paid on the policy so there was no harm.  It said that
the Consumer Protection Act did not apply because Ethel was not injured in her
“business or property.”  Farmers said her emotional distress was not
related to its actions, but to her injuries.

Farmers
eventually did settle the bad faith lawsuit.  However, if Washington’s
Insurance Fair Conduct Act had been in place at the time of her accident,
requiring insurance companies to act in good faith, Ethel would never have had
to go through this.

After the
California Department of Insurance denied Farmers’s rate increase request, the
JD Power ranking dropped substantially. Farmers posted profit over over $1
billion in 2010.