Faced with the worst business interruption in living memory, the insurance giants have, by and large, refused to pay business-interruption claims, Bloomberg News reported. U.S. plaintiffs’ lawyers have filed more than 1,100 complaints against insurers, according to a tally by Tom Baker, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Business owners from small restaurants to major retailers say that they could go bankrupt unless they’re paid. Insurance companies say the payouts could cripple them — one industry estimate looking at just U.S. small businesses with fewer than 100 employees places the total monthly cost of reimbursing their pandemic losses at between $52 billion and $223 billion. The dispute is also playing out in Congress and state legislatures, where bills have been introduced requiring insurers to pay for pandemic-related losses. “The word ‘unprecedented’ is probably overused in this, but I don’t think I have another word for it,” says Henry Daar, an executive vice president who oversees property claims for insurance broker Willis Towers Watson. “There have been huge insurable events in the past, with billions of dollars at issue. All of those involved situations that affected a discrete area and a discrete number of companies. This pandemic has affected everybody.”
