Biggest Home Insurance Companies Denied Nearly Half of Last Year’s Claims
The Socialist Program with Brian Becker
The Socialist Program
4.7 • 587 Ratings
🗓️ 3 June 2026
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A new Wall Street Journal study finds that the five biggest home insurers, Allstate, State Farm, Liberty Mutual, United Services Automobile Association, and Farmers Insurance, denied nearly half of all claims last year. The primary driver is an increase in deductibles, which insurers claim is being done to compensate for an increase in weather-related catastrophes. Professor Richard Wolff and producer Nicole Roussell discuss.
Professor Richard Wolff is an author & co-founder of the organization Democracy at Work. You can find his work at rdwolff.com.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A new study shows that among the biggest five home insurance companies, almost half of resolved claims resulted in no payouts to residents. |
| 0:10.4 | And UAW auto workers went on strike this week in Michigan. |
| 0:14.5 | We need a new system. We need a new society. We need to demand that which may have sounded impossible even a few weeks ago, but state of the working class, and the crimes of big business. |
| 0:59.6 | I'm Nicole Roussel, sitting in for Brian Becker as your host today. |
| 1:03.5 | Brian's traveling this week, but he'll be back next week. |
| 1:06.2 | The Socialist Program brings you content several days a week, thanks to the support of our patrons at patreon.com slash the Socialist Program. |
| 1:13.3 | We appreciate all of your support and encourage you to become a patron today if you enjoy listening to the show. |
| 1:18.7 | Richard Wolfe is the co-founder of the organization Democracy at Work and the author of many books, including understanding capitalism, which is available at democracy at work. |
| 1:28.0 | Dot info. Richard, welcome back to at Democracy at Work.Info. |
| 1:29.8 | Richard, welcome back to the show. |
| 1:32.3 | Thank you, Nicole. Glad to be here. |
| 1:37.2 | So as I said in the introduction, you and I were talking about this new study that just came out that shows that almost half of home insurance claims from the biggest insurance companies |
| 1:41.7 | just aren't getting paid out at all, despite that the insured |
| 1:45.7 | people paid in. I'm reading from this Wall Street Journal article who put this together, |
| 1:50.8 | then they talk about, quote, a home in South Tulsa, Oklahoma that was hammered by a 2024 storm. |
| 1:56.9 | The golf ball size hail put dents in her husband's pickup truck and ravaged their roof. |
| 2:01.4 | An outside contractor said the aging roof needed a $49,000 full replacement. |
| 2:06.1 | She said there were shingles with holes in them falling off the roof. |
| 2:09.4 | State Farm came out and expected the roof and said, no, you're good. |
| 2:13.5 | I mean, let's talk about this. |
| 2:15.5 | And next, we're going to connect this directly to the auto worker strike in Michigan as well. |
| 2:20.1 | Well, let's start by noting that the Wall Street Journal article carries a statistic and correctly did so by comparing the percentage of payouts back 10 years ago in 2016 to the one now, their most recent. So over that 10-year period, |
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