While enjoying dinner at a Friendly’s restaurant with his daughter and her friends from college, William P. Denya stood up and told everyone to be quiet. He had something to say.
If any of you ever get in a car accident, he recalls saying, don’t let your insurance company determine where you get repairs done.
“It’s your car. It’s your choice. Don’t be bullied,” he said.
The message that auto insurers may not require customers to use specific auto body repair shops may be unusual dinnertime chat, but Denya, owner of Denya’s Auto Body in Meriden has been spreading it for about half of the 22 years that he has owned his shop.
“It’s been going on for a long time, and [the insurers] are getting more aggressive with it,” Denya said.
And now it seems, people are starting to listen.
Blumenthal Berates
The Auto Body Association of Connecticut held its annual meeting last week and — for the fourth year running — Attorney General Richard Blumenthal addressed the crowd about the importance of ending insurers’ practice of steering business to shops with which they have business arrangements.
As an auto body customer, he said, “no insurance company can offer you lower premiums, lower deductibles, guarantees of work, threats of delays, warnings about quality of work — all the tactics that you see day in and day out.”
Blumenthal reiterated his view that those tactics are already illegal and said he was “very unhappy with some of the approaches taken by state officials.”
“If we can change that law, we give the insurance department no latitude about honestly and effectively enforcing [it],” he added.
Under commissioner Susan F. Cogswell, the insurance department took no position on a bill Blumenthal has submitted, which would specifically prohibit insurers from funneling business to certain shops by suggesting, for instance, that choosing a different shop would mean non-guaranteed work or delays in service. It would also require that repair shops post a sign from the insurance department explaining consumers’ right to choose.
There is currently reason for optimism among the repair shop owners, particularly since the department’s new commissioner, Thomas R. Sullivan, met with a group of them the day before the annual meeting . Sullivan offered dozens of laminated prototypes of the signs, which Denya and current association president Thomas Bivona, a shop owner in Greenwich, handed to association members at the meeting.
“Consumers have a right to go to any insurance repair shop that they choose,” said department spokesperson Debra Korta.
“That’s been the law on the books, and that position hasn’t changed. We are simply looking for ways to enhance consumers’ understanding of their rights,” Korta said.
Though the attorney general’s bill has passed through the committee process and could be called for a vote in the state Senate, it still faces strong opposition from the auto insurance industry, which feels it is being unfairly targeted for making smart business partnerships, resulting in direct repair relationships that offer customers faster, less expensive repairs.
Robert Kehmna, of the Insurance Association of Connecticut, warned the Insurance Committee in February that the provision was “fundamentally anti-consumer, anti-competitive, and would lead directly to [an] increase in automobile insurance costs.”
He said the bill would eliminate the ability of auto insurers to offer direct repair programs, which he said ensure that customers get quick, quality work by shops that insurers have pre-inspected, and that customer satisfaction surveys bear that out.
