By JERRY NOWICKI
Capitol News Illinois
jnowicki@capitolnewsillinois.com
SPRINGFIELD — Gov. JB Pritzker and the Illinois Department of Insurance are calling on insurers to expedite claims and payments to businesses hit by looters in recent days.
“It is my expectation and the expectation of the Illinois Department of Insurance that insurance companies will do everything in their power to give their customers the resources they need to rebuild and get back on their feet as soon as possible,” Pritzker said. “To that end, my administration has been in consultation with major insurance companies on the quick and robust support they should provide Illinois business owners who have experienced property damage, including but not limited to riots, vandalism and looting.”
Pritzker made the announcement at a Chicago news conference Monday, where he was joined by Robert Muriel, director of the Department of Insurance.
IDOI released the Company Bulletin — a tool aimed at providing “timely, relevant, and helpful guidance” to insurance companies — requesting that insurers take specific measures to help businesses rebuild.
Per a news release from the governor’s office, insurers should “apply claims best practices consistent with the categorization of this event as a catastrophic event.” They should also expedite claims handling, and advance claim payments. Another expectation is “fair treatment of all policyholders, regardless of size.”
Insurers should also implement a moratorium on cancellations or non-renewal of impacted policyholders for 60 days and should “err on the side of the policyholder” when paying claims as a result of “riots, civil commotion, or vandalism” even if the policyholder was unable to make full premium payments during the period following the governor’s stay-at-home order.
Pritzker said as the regulators of insurers, the state has the ability to “write them up” during their licensing processes and processes of review. Muriel also said the department can levy fines and suspend licenses.
“Probably the number one thing we can do is engage in market conduct examinations, to the extent that insurance companies are not complying with the law or doing what we expect of them, we have the ability to send in examiners into their offices to make sure that they are doing what they’re supposed to,” he said.
The governor also differentiated looters and rioters from the peaceful protestors of the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man who died in Minneapolis on May 25 as a white police officer knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes.
“Over the last 10 days, peaceful protesters, motivated by the killings of George Floyd and countless others who lost their lives to systemic racism, the tens of thousands have taken to the streets in Illinois in Anna, in Springfield, in East St. Louis, in Decatur, in Chicago, in cities and towns across our state to call for justice, for police accountability, for reform and for an end to the disparities in health care and food access, job opportunities, education and housing,” Pritzker said. “There were also those who tried to steal the peaceful voices and importance of this moment by looting and burning and damaging small businesses and private and public property, especially in communities of color.”
Pritzker said the property damage hit at a particularly bad time for some businesses already reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic and his associated March 20 stay-at-home order.
The state’s coronavirus numbers continued to decline in terms of hospital beds in use by those with COVID-19 and the number of tests that are producing positive results. Pritzker said as numbers improve “it gives us some confidence level about trying to open things up even more.”
The preliminary seven-day statewide positivity rate from June 1 through June 7 is 5 percent, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health.
“Yeah, I want to bring back indoor dining as much as anybody. And again, I’m trying to listen to, I get that there are others who have allowed 50 percent or 25 percent seating. That’s something I want to get to there’s no doubt,” Pritzker said. “And we think about it every day and again I push on the epidemiologists for the right answers here. The more we can get people back to work, the more we can get back to normal, the better off we are. So again, I’ll keep looking at it and keep talking to them and hoping to get the advice at that moment.”
There were 2,496 hospital beds in use by COVID-19 patients as of midnight Monday, 713 of which were intensive care unit beds. There were 443 people on ventilators with COVID-19. All numbers show a significant decrease from the highs of April and May and a continued down trend.
There were 658 new cases of the virus confirmed Monday among 16,099 tests results reported over the previous 24 hours. There were 23 additional COVID-19-related deaths reported, bringing total fatalities to 5,924 in Illinois.
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service covering state government and distributed to more than 400 newspapers statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
