After twenty-plus years handling car accident cases across Long Island, I’ve lost count of how many times a client has asked me some version of this question. Usually, it comes out right after they’ve told me their claim was denied, or that the adjuster offered them a settlement that wouldn’t even cover their emergency room visit, let alone the physical therapy and lost wages that followed.
I get why it feels that way. You’ve paid your premiums faithfully for years—maybe decades—and when you finally need to use the coverage you’ve been paying for, the company that cashed all those checks suddenly treats you like you’re trying to scam them. But the honest answer is no, insurance companies aren’t evil. I actually think they’re more like sharks, which I realize sounds like a weird distinction to make, but hear me out.
A shark is genuinely dangerous. It can cause tremendous harm, and you’d be foolish not to respect that. But there’s no malice behind what a shark does. It doesn’t hate you. It isn’t acting out of spite. It’s just doing what sharks are built to do. Insurance companies operate the same way—they’re for-profit businesses designed to collect premiums and pay out as little as possible on claims. That’s not a moral failing on their part; it’s literally the business model. And once you look at it that way, the frustrating things that happen after a car accident start to make a lot more sense.
Here’s something most people don’t fully appreciate until they’re living through it: your relationship with your insurance company changes fundamentally the moment you file a claim.
While you’re paying premiums every month, you’re a customer. You’re revenue. The company has every incentive to keep you reasonably happy, so you don’t start shopping around for a better rate. But the second you file a claim—whether it’s after a rear-end collision on the LIE or a bad intersection accident in Huntington—you stop being a customer and start being a liability. You become a line item that someone’s job depends on minimizing.
This is why so many injured drivers across Nassau and Suffolk County run into the same frustrating patterns. The adjuster takes forever to return calls, or keeps asking for documents you’ve already sent twice. Your doctor recommends a course of treatment and the insurance company’s reviewer (who has never examined you) decides it’s “excessive.” You had a gap in treatment because you were waiting three weeks for an MRI authorization, and now they’re using that gap to argue your injuries must not be that serious.
None of that is “evil” in any meaningful sense. But it’s also not fair, and it’s not what most people expect when they’ve been paying premiums in good faith for years.
If insurance companies are just doing what they’re designed to do, what actually stops them from being even more aggressive? What prevents them from simply denying every claim and daring people to sue?
A couple of things, really, though they’re not equally effective.
The first is public perception, and it matters more than you might think. Insurance companies spend enormous amounts on advertising—the talking gecko, the “mayhem” guy, all those vaguely heartwarming commercials—because their entire business depends on people trusting them enough to keep buying policies. If a company developed a reputation for denying every legitimate claim, they’d eventually lose customers faster than they could replace them. So there’s a ceiling on how aggressive any insurer can be without damaging their own brand. That said, the ceiling is pretty high, and “we’re not quite bad enough to tank our reputation” isn’t exactly a comforting standard if you’re the one fighting for a fair settlement.
The second check on insurance company behavior—and honestly, the more effective one—is attorneys. Personal injury lawyers exist specifically to hold insurers accountable to the terms of the policies they sold. The Insurance Research Council has done studies on this, and the numbers are pretty striking: claimants who hire attorneys receive settlements averaging three to three-and-a-half times higher than people who try to handle their claims without help. Other research shows that something like 91% of represented claimants receive a payout, compared to around 51% of people who negotiate on their own.
That gap exists because experienced attorneys understand how insurance companies actually evaluate claims, how policy language gets interpreted and applied, and what documentation you need to counter the tactics adjusters use to minimize payouts.
One thing I sometimes hear is that hiring a lawyer makes everything take longer, and I want to be honest about that—there’s some truth to it. Claims handled without attorneys do often close faster. But the reason they close faster is usually that the injured person accepted a lowball offer because they didn’t know what their claim was actually worth, or because they were exhausted and just wanted it to be over.
When an attorney gets involved, the timeline extends because we’re doing the work that should be done: gathering complete medical records, getting opinions from treating physicians about long-term prognosis, calculating lost wages properly (including future losses, not just the paychecks you’ve already missed), and building a case file that doesn’t leave money on the table. Whether that tradeoff makes sense depends on your situation, but I’d rather a client take a few extra months and walk away with a settlement that actually reflects what happened to them.
I think the reason so many people feel genuinely betrayed by their insurance company—not just frustrated, but personally let down—is that they expected the relationship to mean something. You pay premiums for fifteen years without filing a single claim, and when you finally need help, you assume the company will remember that. You expect them to treat you like a loyal customer who deserves the benefit of the doubt.
But that’s not how the system works. The moment you file a claim, you move from the “revenue” column to the “expense” column, and the person handling your file has no idea whether you’ve been a customer for two months or twenty years. Their job is to close claims efficiently, which in practice means closing them cheaply. It’s not personal, but it sure feels personal when you’re the one dealing with injuries and bills and an offer that seems to ignore everything you’ve been through.
Honestly, no. I don’t think “evil” is the right framework for understanding what they do. They’re large corporations operating exactly the way large corporations are designed to operate, which means prioritizing their financial interests in every interaction. The adjusters and reviewers who work there aren’t bad people—they’re just doing jobs that require them to minimize what the company pays out.
The problem is that when you’re injured in a car accident in Nassau or Suffolk County, you’re not a corporation. You’re a person dealing with pain, medical appointments, missed work, and the stress of not knowing how you’re going to manage all of it. And navigating the insurance system alone, when the other side has teams of people whose entire job is to pay you less, puts you at a real disadvantage.
That’s why personal injury attorneys exist—not because insurance companies are villains who need to be defeated, but because the system only works the way it’s supposed to when both sides have someone who knows the rules. When your health and your family’s financial stability are on the line, you deserve to have someone you can contact whose interests are aligned with yours.
