The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Broken Promises: How insurers put Profits over Promises by David Skipton

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

Broken Promises: How insurers put Profits over Promises by David Skipton https://www.amazon.com/Broken-Promises-insurers-Pro%EF%AC%81ts-over/dp/B0FPT69XRX Skiptoninc.com Synopsis: When someone suffers a serious loss at their home or business, one of the first things they often think is this: “At least I have insurance.” But the claims process is deviously designed to pay only pennies on the dollar for losses. Furthermore, if you take an insurance company to court, you’ll find that the legal system is stacked against you. David Skipton brings his many years of claims adjusting experience to help you avoid the pitfalls in the claims process. Learn how to: recognize the tricks insurance companies play to cheat you out of money; take steps to improve your chances of enjoying a favorable outcome on a claim; and receive fair compensation in the event of an insurance payout. While insurance companies once looked out for customers, times are changing, and you need to know what motivates them if you want any chance to get what you’re owed. It doesn’t matter if you own a business or a home-if you have an active claim or not- it’s important to demystify the claims process. It begins by learning how to protect your best interests and learning how to play The Claims Game.

You wanted the best... You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times.

Because you're about to go on a monster education role. rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hey, folks, Voss here from thecris Foss Show.com. There you go, ladies and gentlemen, the early season that makes official welcome the big show. As always, for nearly 20 years, we've been bringing the Chris Voss show. We are the oldest living of the original podcast that still delivers one to two new shows a day. Everybody's kind of six months, three months, once a year, whatever they get around to it, I guess.

All right, we're old, folks. but to help keep the dream alive, go to Goodrease.com, Fortresschusch, Christfoss, LinkedIn.com, Fortresschusfoss, YouTube.com, Fortess, Chris Foss, and all those crazy places on the internet. Opinions expressed by guests on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the host

or the Chris Foss show. Some guests of the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it's not an endorsement or review of any kind. Today, we're an amazing young man on the show. We're talking about his business and some of the ways he's helping people. His book is entitled, Broken Promises, How Insurers put profits over promises by David Skippton. We're going to get into some of the deets with him, as the kids say.

I don't really know if that's what they say. He is the founder, owner, operator, and holds a bachelor's degree in business administration with an emphasis in marketing and accountancy over the last two and a half decades. Skipton claims management. He runs, and we're going to be talking about some of the things they do there and what they do to help consumers with insurers, I guess. claims and stuff like that. And he has handled hundreds of multimillion dollar insurance claims.

Over the previous decade, he was also in the restaurant design construction industry, where he was involved in the construction of more than 150 restaurants and food service facilities. His hands-on construction experience has a significant benefit in investigating an estimated structural damage. David is one of the few public adjusters to achieve the prestigious CPCU award and PCS. LA Award designation, which is an intensive curriculum of insurance law courses designed to educate us, adjusters in understanding and applying courtroom decisions to everyday insurance coverage situations. Welcome the show. How are you, David? Very good. How are you doing, Chris?

I'm doing excellent. Welcome the show. Give us your dot com's websites. Where do you want people to get to know you guys better on the internet? The website, Skipton and Associates, Inc. is a, Skipton. Claims Management, I believe it is. Scypton Claimsmanagement.com. They can reach us there. I'm not sure what other, we've got other website addresses.

I don't keep track of all that. There you go. Not your department. That's the tech guys. We're not that hard to find. There you go. And you guys are licensed in, it looks like roughly 30 states, and I don't have an exact count on that. 39 states

39 states right now and we're currently just got licensed up in British Columbia as well wow there you go well you know it's an insurance claims sort of world with everything going on with you know what are the people

caught climate change whatever I mean everything seems to be going to hell lately with the weather somebody made Mother Earth very angry or something I don't know Yeah, and there's been an awful lot of man-made fires, too, that people have reveled in. Some of the worst disasters we've experienced over the last year were man-made costs. Yeah. I'm starting to regret all the times I went to Taco Bell buffet and put so much of that methane in the air.

But let's talk about your book. Broken Promises, How Insurers Put Profits Over, or. profits over promises, yes. Yeah. Well, the book is basically it's a manual for our homeowner to read and look at and get ideas on what the claims process is all about. You know, it seems like a very mystical thing to people that aren't in the business, but I try and demystify it to people and give them an opportunity to see what's hidden behind the curtain with the insurance companies and give them some advice on what to do and how to

handle certain situations. In the book, I talk about individual clients that we've had, like the opening stories about a guy that's a, he was a retired Ford Motor executive, a president for Ford Motor Company, and his home, he came home from home from a vacation, and water was pouring out his garage door. Oh, no. He got inside, and the whole house, it was filled with several inches of water, and it had been running for quite some time because there was a high-pressure line. And so that kind of kicks the book off with little stories about claims that we've handled, and people can understand like here he had the biggest insurance company in the United States

and he thought that hey I'm covered this is good at least I got insurance right but you try and use it and then you find out really how good that insurance is yeah we've had people on the show now that are telling us for a while years now that they're building like tons of back doors or escape closet maybe is the right word, you know better than I, into contracts now. They're basically designed to not pay if they really don't want to, I guess. Is that true? Exactly right.

Yeah, they can not pay a claim whenever they feel like it. And sometimes they just do it to be obstinate. And that first story that I talked about with Bill and Ruth, their insurance, carrier just played hardball the whole time. It took them eight days to come out and see the loss for the first time. And then the adjuster wrote up his scope and wouldn't share it with us. He says it has to be approved by management. It took him 34 days to approve

and it was half what we had agreed upon with them during their inspection. So kind of what we run into on a routine basis unfortunately. Yeah. And in the book you write about the basic claims process designed to only pay pennies on the dollar for losses. I mean, so basically, they love it when you make your payment on time and get unhappy if you don't, but when it comes to getting the money back out of them, well, I mean, they're pretty miserly about it, I guess. They delay, delay and delay it some more until you get so frustrated with it.

You just find, give me something. Just give me something to go and go away. Yeah, exactly. You talk in the book about recognizing some of the tricks that insurance companies play to cheat you out of money. Yes, yes. They have a lot of them. And one of them, of course, is this sending out an adjuster with no authority on the claim. So how does that fulfill their promise to the insurer to send a guy out with no authority to settle the claim?

To me, it doesn't seem that that's the appropriate way to go about it. And unfortunately, that's more or less the way insurance companies are starting to work now. Wow. It's really a shame. I mean, this shouldn't, you know, it seems like we've reached a world where, you know, I've been telling people, because I grew up in the world of Tom Peters, you know, commitment to excellence and this big customer service thing that used to be a big deal back of the day.

It seems largely dead. Like, I've actually started telling people, we need to legislate customer service. We need laws because it is, I mean, between these chatbots and all this bullshit, it seems like companies are just more and more putting up, you know, hoops for you to jump through and anything they can to avoid having to deal with you, except when, of course, processing your credit card. Yeah. Well, and the insurance companies are working to lobby the judiciary to get favorable rulings on their side. and it's really a travesty what's going on. Homeowners are really, if you can find insurance, then you've got to find a way to get your insurance money out of them.

That's the hard part. It really takes a professional. We don't have to litigate nearly as much as most people would think because we're professionals in this business and they respect us. And when they see CPCU behind my name, they know that that's the highest designation and insurance. So they know that they're dealing with a professional. Yeah. So.

Do you find that they pray a little bit on people that don't have attorneys? They, they, you know, I've seen somewhere, you know, they try to scourge me from talking to an attorney. There was a, I got rear-ended one time. I was on the freeway, we were moving slow through Las Vegas, and a gal had reached back to, you know, her baby was in the back seat, and she'd reach back in slow traffic. And I'd gotten rear-ended enough that, you know, it did severe damage to the back of my car and gave me whiplash. I never thought I'd get that, but it did. And, and yeah, right away they were like, oh, well, if you're going to hire attorney, then we're going to have to, this is going to change the game. We're not going to negotiate, you know, they were trying to get me avoid that and stuff.

Trying to keep you away from hiring an attorney, yeah. Well, they came out right away to the house and was trying to get me to sign papers that would give them access to my prior, all my radical records, so they could blame the whiplash, I guess. Oh, old damage and stuff, you know, football injury or something. I mean, it was really interesting how they tried to hardrail me. And I, I'm a businessman, so I was just like, you know, let me, this is what I asked him, it was kind of funny. I asked him, I said, let me ask you this. if I had an attorney sitting here, would he let me sign that paper turning over my medical records and giving you all this data and agreeing to a settlement?

And they go, eh, probably not. And I go, well, then I'm not signing. Yeah. Well, it's a game out there with these insurance companies. And it really is. There's no game to homeowners, though. had a loss and lost everything that they had. Oh, yeah. You're living out of a hotel room.

You're living out an RV. You know, like a lot of these people were from Park Palisades, the same thing up in Oregon, Washington. Let me ask you this. Is it, is the best way to do is to come in guns blazing? Or is the best thing to do to try and see if you can work something out yourself and then hire the muscle? Or, you know, it's just better to show up at the party with all the muscle.

To be honest with you, trying to go at yourself. is not a good idea. You don't get anywhere, you don't make any friends with an insurance company by being foolish. And that's foolish to try and do it on your own. We don't come in guns blazing. We come in and we're professionals.

And we treat them like professionals that they should be. And we document everything that they do and everything they don't do properly. and we put it in writing to them in letters. And our letters create a scenario that a court could look at and go, well, these guys are really treating these people badly. And at some point, there's something called punitive damages, which are bad faith damages, which is when an insurance company doesn't act properly,

they can get fined by the court for bad faith claims handling. And so that's one of the things that we look at. And we do the letters in order to push the claim forward, not to get into bad faith claims handling, but just to document the record as to what they did and what they didn't do and how they were did it wrong, and we write it up, and we paper the file with letters. There's no shortcut in the claims process.

You've got to be able to write a lot of letters to the insurance company. I mean, I've got a claim right now in Chicago, the lightning strike from February, and the insurance company still hasn't paid the claim, even though they went out and they walked the loss with us and agreed with us. We came up with $1.6 million. The adjuster agreed with everything, and he came back with $260,000. What the hell?

Yeah, that's what we said. And we came and I said, what the heck were you thinking, you know? Yeah, that's quite good. He kind of had egg on his face there a little bit, you know, and he says, well, you know, that's what I remembered, you know. So we went back through. I said, well, let's go through my estimate

and we'll cross off everything that you think is wrong on that, right? We didn't cross a single thing off of our estimate. every damage that we placed a value on he agreed with so now we've been sitting for another 30-some

days waiting for the approval on this new evaluation and he still hasn't been able to send it to me yet got to get approval from the insurance company before he sends it so delayed delay stall delay delay

meantime these people are you know running out of ALE they've already used up six or seven months of their additional living expense, you know, coverage. Yeah. That's crazy, man. I think we need to legislate customer services area, too. You know, we were making some headway there where they, you know,

like with an airline insurance or an airline business where it's like, no, you can't just give people a shitty credit that they have to use in the future. I've gotten those credits where they're like, oh, yeah, we're going to refund your flight. but yeah, you just get a credit for your next flight. And then I never use it. And they know that. It's kind of like a coupon. They know it's a scam that you're going to forget to bring the coupon and yada, yada, yada.

So there's a new thing now. Now the insurance companies are pushing to keep public adjusters out of the business. Really? They're trying to outlaw public adjusters in the state of Tennessee. Wow. And so this is another thing they're doing because we cost them too much money. because we evaluate the claims fairly and hold them accountable for what the promise that they made to the insurer is. That's wild, man.

It's really, this country is getting too much. Capitalism is great, but capitalism also needs to be, have guardrails. It can't just be, you know, freeload of willy-nilly. Otherwise, well, well, anyway, so you, the people can more to the book. They can read it what they need to do and how to play, as you put it. the claims game. Tell us about some of the stuff you do there at your at your firm. Do you consult with anybody and everybody? I mean, I know there's some limits to your legal counsel. If they're not in the 10 states or 11 states, whatever it is that you're not in, how does that work?

No, no. We've got legal counsel in every state in the states. And we've got some really good attorneys behind us and you might gather from my business we do an awful lot of litigating clans and it works out really well because we never lose a claim we just settled a nice one for six point five million dollars on a hotel loss here in Scottsdale about a month ago we just got to check in last week so nice and so So we do that kind of stuff. And then we have, what is I going to say? I lost my train.

I thought there. The, oh, with the insurance attorneys, the problem that you have with these small claims, you've got to have a claim that's big enough to warrant having an attorney on it. If you get down to a $20,000 difference with the insurance company, a $50,000 difference, that's not going to move the needle when it comes to getting an attorney to represent. It's got to be a certain value, and that's the same truth with our company. We don't handle the small claims because it's just not cost effective to handle the smaller claims, although I have epithy for everybody

and try and help them as much as I can. We can only do so much. And so if it's a smaller claim, sometimes we've got some smaller public adjusters around that represent people on smaller claims and we'll refer them off to somebody else that's better suited for their claim. All right.

Well, that's really good. You know, there's resources you can refer people to and stuff like that. Is there other, I imagine you can't say this on air, but does the book maybe give us some idea of maybe what the good insurance companies are? Are there any good insurance companies? Maybe it's the better question. That's an oxymor. It's a shame that it's a shame, but that's the, that's honest truth. There is no good insurance company.

Wow. all just in it now. They're all in it for one thing. And it all started, you know, back in about 1992, I think it was or something, when Allstate decided to get out of the insurance business and to roll off their insurance business. And so they put the insurance business up for sale. And they went to McKinney.

and company to get a valuation and to find out how they could make more money. And they came in with all these MBAs and went through every facet of the insurance process. And they came back with recommendations to the insurance company that we were able through litigation to get copies of. They had things like, they had like a thing where it says if insurance is a zero-sum game. So that means, in other words, if they win, you lose. There's no way both have a win-win situation. So they said that that's how it is. And they started putting some of these processes into practice.

practice with Allstate and they jumped their profit up over the next two years substantially. And all the other insurance companies looked at it and said, my goodness, look at what they're doing over there, right? And so now all of them have jumped on the bandwagon and started doing things the same way. Wow. Yeah. So if they don't, if they don't play fair, then you've got to, you know, go at them hard, you know. But unfortunately, it's not all insurance claims wind up in litigation. And most of them don't.

But on the rare occasion that they're really bad, that can be a really good outcome for an insurance, for an insurer. because then you get all the punitive damages money as well. Oh, yeah. The, what was the question? I had the question and then it zipped out. This is the problem with having extreme ADHD. Everything is squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel.

But, yeah, that's unfortunate that this is the state of affairs we've reached with this. You know, you pay, you know, one thing I remember years and years ago was the state farm thing and it was a i think it was something here in utah their house had burned down or something happened their house and they literally uh they literally rode that thing out in court till those people died like 25 years or 20 years or something crazy and you know finally the people just died because they were old when they started and and uh and yeah it was like i'd never go with state for years after the story they're well state firm is the biggest and they're the worst Really? Wow. And then, you know, they were pulling out of California and giving California hard time right when that fire hit.

Well, and their policies aren't very good either. Really? Put a lot of stuff in their policies that is not very favorable. So you think that you're buying, you know, a great coverage from a big, you know, insurance company like State Farm and they are big, but the coverage isn't that good. And although it's very similar in a lot of respects to other. other policies, but they put on little things in their policy that keep you from making claims on certain types of things. Wow.

A tricky-dicky trapdoor hidden in things, you know. I mean, I just love how sometimes they can just be like, well, you sneeze once, so that's a precondition of whatever. I don't know. And, you know, it's pretty wild. So is it, oh, I remember my question now. So is this reached the point where maybe before I sign up with insurance agency, I should get advice or the contract read from an attorney? Is that where we're at now?

Does I tell me if I should sign it? Almost, yeah. You know, it's really, I don't see how, if somebody has a major loss, they would benefit by going it on their own without having a experienced public adjuster. Because experienced public adjuster, we kept the track of our claims. And on the claims that we did over a 10-year period of time, we averaged over five times more than the insurance company would have paid if we hadn't have gone in. why are they like that?

Is there some insurance policy they have that pays those games? Every dollar they save is a dollar that goes to their bottom line. Yeah. How about profit? But you would think that, I mean, they must, I guess the equation is they're making more money, you know, suckering people out of what they should pay them enough, and more so that can easily absorb the punitive damages you guys end up with, right? Yeah, absolutely.

they're just they're making the calculation that it's worth it it's like that it's like that scene in fight club with the car that was burned and they're like yeah my company makes a makes a calculation to decide if it wants to recall cars and if there's just not enough deaths it's consistently the same thing we don't mess with it and you're just like what the yeah yeah i mean the value of human life i mean used to be when you went to other countries there was little value of human life i'm starting to wonder now that these days in America. And then there are people that aren't very well informed. We wrote up the claim. We had represented the island of Puerto Rico at the hurricane. And we did the capital complex for the state of Puerto Rico. We wrote it up for about 40. $1 million or something

a change of the people in Congress and they went from Republican to Democrat and that I don't know what difference that made but

the new administration came in and said no that's way too much money we're happy with the $14 million we've got we're going to close the claim out so yeah And they just left it on the table, you know, yet they, you know, don't have adequate water, you know, and adequate sewage down there and stuff, you know.

Wow. God. And they left all that money on the table. Well, I guess that's the game, you know, delay long enough. People take just about anything just to survive. And it's sad that, you know, these people are putting that survival mechanism where they have to choose their things. thing. It's just wild, man. I should have become, I wish I would have become an attorney back of the day because you now need them for so many bloody things going on.

Absolutely. Well, you know, with, you know, public insurance adjusters, we do so much stuff that people don't understand. I mean, we've got industrial hygienists at our, at our phone, you know, a phone call away. Because industrial hygienists? Do they make sure that the machines are taking a bath or something? No, make sure that the people that had damage from the fire loss in California, we go into the house and we open up walls and take samples of the air quality and soot samples from the building to figure out if it's been contaminated. And that's how we're getting a lot of these buildings completely stripped out and clean

start to finish, you know, even though people say, you know, it's smoke, it's just smoke, right? Well, it's more than just smoke. There's more than, metals in the smoke and stuff. And so. I remember seeing people going back into their houses that had survived. And just to go back in the area, they were having to wear hazmat suits because the hazardous waste and the burning of, you know, chemicals and plastics

and God knows what, bestus, maybe in some of those older homes. It was just all in the air. And even the homes that survived, they had this soot that was everywhere. Like, you know, their kitchen counters and everything that had gotten into the house. And they're wearing hazmat suits in their own house. And I'm like, geez, these poor people can't even go home. Exactly. Unless you want to wear a hazmat suit.

It doesn't go away, you know. Just wiping it off with a rag or something. They don't make it go away because it's stuck in the whelps, in the interstitial wall cavities. And so. Probably all in the vents, you know, you don't want to be breathing that stuff. Holy crap. I mean, just, it's bad enough, you know, it's one thing. It's insult the injury.

You know, it's bad enough to you lose your house or lose portions of your house or you have fire damage, but it survived. And, you know, Maui's another place that was a big deal and it's crazy and all this stuff. What have I asked you about or what sort of advice do you want to tease out to people on the show on working with you and what they should know about the insurance business? Well, the insurance business is a racket, and you need somebody on your side that knows the game as well as they do. And unfortunately, it's not a game for us. It's very serious business. But we are there to help people start to feel.

finish and we won't leave any stone unturn when it comes to getting the claim paid properly. There you go. So do you find that it helps if you hire an attorney right away that, you know, they'll take, they'll maybe get the claim done easier or does that? No, not necessarily. When actually when you hire an attorney, it delays it out. Oh, really? A significant amount of time because of the court filings and stuff. So that could delay. lay it out two years.

You know, so we don't advise getting an attorney involved right away. What we do is we try and do our job and we document everything the insurance company does and everything they don't do. And we put it in writing until we create a whole scenario of the loss to take into a courtroom. And then we hire an attorney who said, look at all the damages that you guys have cost, you know. And then let them do their thing. We just settled a claim. Well, in this hotel, that was like $6.9 million.

And some of it was for contaminants in the structure that they refused to acknowledge initially. So we got an attorney involved. and they came to the table very quickly. That's unusual to get an insurance company to settle a claim within, you know, six months or seven months. Wow. But, yeah. I mean, it used to be that you would look at some sort of settlement as, you know, in business or people. And you'd be like, well, if we take them to court and we hire an attorney and they got to pay attorney's fees and punitive damages,

then maybe that'll set them straight. I mean, that's kind of what the purpose of punitive damages were supposed to be, but it sounds like we need to revisit that legislation. Yeah, the change in the way they calculate punitive damages now, they've really taken a lot of the guts out of it. Oh, really? Yeah. Do they legislate that recently, or has that been...

Well, it started with Campbell out of Utah, where the court awarded, I don't know, some like $325 million or something on a claim that was relatively small, you know, maybe $300,000 claim or something. They said that that's much too high a multiplier for punitive damages. So this went to the national court. So what they did was they went to the court, and the court cut it way back. So now you can't get worse. There's a claim in Arizona called Hawkins v. Allstate, where Allstate was taking

cars that were a total loss, and they were taking the $35 off the claim for cleaning the car. because they said, well, it's total, so you don't need to clean it, right? But they took it out of their estimates, say, well, when you get it back from the shop, it's got to be clean, you know? Yeah. So they took that and they wound up getting $3.5 million in bad faith damages over a $35 line item. That was the old way. Wow.

Where you had some teeth in the bad faith. Claim time was up. But if we do our job properly, you're not going to need an attorney. I can say, I mean, there are cases where we'll suggest you get an attorney if they're really being wrongful. But more often than not, we don't have to hire an attorney to get the claim paid properly. Okay. Well, as we go out, give people final pitch out on how they can onboard with you, reach out, handshake, find out if they're if they're you know someone that you would want to work with and all that

good stuff yeah they can email me at david at skippton inc.com that's david at skippton sk-i-p-t-o-n-n-c-c-c-com and they can do that or they can call me on the phone at 1-800-357-88- there you go well thank you very much david for come on the show and thank you for fighting a good fight against these. He's crazy dudes. It's just insane to me that even punitive damages, they are making enough money that those punitive damages are dropping the bucket for what they're able to get away with.

That's just, let's see. No insurance company is hurting for money. I've seen that on the stock market. They're doing quite well. Yeah. That's how they build all those big buildings and how they have State Farm Stadium, you know. State Farm Stadium.

Yeah, your claim isn't being paid today, sir, because, well, we had to put it on the building. Yeah, exactly. That's lovely. America, it's great. Anyway, thank you very much, Dave, for coming to show. We really appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thank you.

And thanks for us for tuning in. Order up his book, wherever fine books are sold. It is entitled Broken Promises, How Insurers Put Profits Over Promises. Thanks to mine. for tuning in, go to Goodrease.com, Fortress, Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Christfuss, YouTube.com, Forchuschusch, Chris Foss, and all those crazy places on the internet. Be good at each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time. You've been listening to the most amazing, intelligent podcast ever made to improve your brain and your life.

Warning. Consuming too much of the Chris Walsh Show podcast can lead to people thinking you're smarter, younger, and irresistible sexy. Consume in regularly moderated amounts. Consult a doctor for any resulting brain bleed. Thank you.