The insurance company denied my claim because they said the policy had been cashed out in 2016. By me, they said. In person, with ID. The problem was that I was in a hospital bed in 2016 for eleven weeks, and I still have the discharge summary to prove it. The adjuster believed me faster than I expected, which frightened me more than if she’d argued. She said this was the fourth claim like this, and the other three were all from the same agent’s book.
She asked whether I’d ever met the agent in person. I told her I hadn’t, but I remembered his name because my father had bought several policies through him years ago. The adjuster asked me to wait while she checked something, then returned with a copy of the original payout form. The signature looked enough like mine to fool someone who didn’t know me well. But the date on the form was during the seventh week of my hospitalization, when I couldn’t even walk without assistance.
Then I noticed the witness signature. It belonged to a nurse who had worked at the hospital during my stay. I called the hospital and asked whether she had been on duty that week. They confirmed she had, but said she had retired shortly afterward. I tracked her down and showed her a copy of the form. She looked at it for less than five seconds before telling me she had never signed it. Then she asked me whether the insurance agent had ever visited me in the hospital.
I said no. She looked relieved, but then she told me something that made the whole thing worse. During my hospitalization, someone had come to the nurses’ station several times asking for information about me, always claiming to be a family member. She had assumed it was my father. My father had been dead for three years. The adjuster called me that evening and said they had found something in the agent’s old records. There was a list of four policies, four cash payouts, and four people who had all been hospitalized at the time their policies were supposedly cashed out. Beside my name was a handwritten note: “Do not contact until the original agent is found.”:::
