Bob CollinsMaybe it’s only coincidence, but the gigantic insurer AIG has had a change of heart on the insurance coverage it provided to Madeleine Maldonado, 87, the Massachusetts woman who lost it when she wrote the wrong words on her check.
As mentioned on NewsCut earlier this week, Maldonado, who has dementia, wrote the correct numbers on her check for $3,399.91, her premium for her long-term care coverage. But she wrote the wrong words on the check.
And that was enough of a technicality for AIG to cancel the coverage.
Her daughter, Carey Peabody, tried everything for a year to get the insurance company to have a heart, even enlisting the Massachusetts attorney general.
But nothing changed until the Boston Globe ran the story.
Like I said: maybe coincidence.
“Our priority is to honor our commitments to customers like the Maldonado family, and we work hard to ensure that every claim is handled fairly,” AIG said in a statement. “Once the issue was raised to the attention of senior management, we reviewed the case and made the decision to reinstate the policy.”
That’s exactly the opposite of what her daughter found. Over the course of her fight, she said the higher up she went in the corporation, the more hard-hearted the response.
“I appreciate AIG reopening the case for review and changing its determination to give us the insurance,” her daughter tells the Globe. “But frankly, we never should have been in this position. I spent more than a year pleading my case, and brought in the attorney general, but only after my mother’s picture and story appeared on the front page of the newspaper did AIG really respond.”
“She really didn’t understand how much of a big deal it was until it was in the paper,” Peabody said. “Then she was pretty disheartened, thinking she had really dropped the ball. But now there’s a happy ending to this story.”
AIG says it will waive the woman’s premiums for the last year to bring her coverage up to date.
