An insurance claims adjuster reveals the iniquities of the industry in this manual.

Drawing on a lifetime of experience as an adjuster, Skipton intends his compact book to be a guide for readers facing the insurance claims process. The author stresses at the outset that he’s not instructing readers in how to adjust their own insurance claims since that takes years of experience. Rather, he wants to give them as much information as possible about the modern-day insurance world to inform their choices should they ever need to deal with that realm. “Knowing how the game is played can empower the consumer to take actions to protect their interests,” he writes, and his manual breaks down how that game works. Most insurance companies, he reminds his readers, have taken much of the discretion away from field adjusters and given it to claims managers in committees. “This program,” he writes, “is designed to control claims costs and it makes the process of negotiating a fair settlement much more difficult and vastly more time consuming.” This ominous note reverberates throughout the book: Insurance companies have gradually shifted to an explicitly adversarial role with their customers, keeping them inconvenienced, uncomfortable, and every day more motivated to settle a claim against their own best interests. “They know this,” he writes, referring to insurance companies, “and they now have you just where they want you.” Much of his examination is necessarily technical—judges, umpires, changes in legislation, loss settlement provisions—but Skipton is clear up front that his target audience comprises readers already facing insurance questions. His narrative energy is so bracing that those readers will not only be informed, but also entertained in every one of the book’s sections even though the actual tidings in these pages are almost always depressing. A caring, illuminating, yet blunt assessment of insurance claims adjusting.