Is your life insurance as good as you think it is?

Man questions law after wife's death payout denied
Seeks change in burden of proof

Associated Press / May 12, 2008
ASHLAND - When Jenny and John Crowley learned they were having a baby, they did the responsible thing: They bought life insurance.


Barely in their 30s, they passed the insurance company's physicals, applied for a $500,000 policy for Jenny and a $1 million policy for John, and thought they would not have to worry about it for decades.

The Savings Bank Life Insurance Co. of Massachusetts was so taken with the Crowleys, the company used a photograph of their newborn daughter swaddled in a yellow blanket on the cover of one of its brochures.

Just one year later, Jenny was dead of an aggressive form of breast cancer, and when John tried to start his life anew as a single father, the company rejected his claim for it to pay his wife's policy.

The company said that even though doctors said Jenny was healthy, she must have been sick before they agreed to insure her.

"I took solace in the fact that I had this life insurance policy that was designed to protect me financially. Without that, it put a lot of stress on me," John Crowley said. "Financially, I was thinking about how am I going to care for my daughter, how am I going to be a mom and a dad? It's a very rough and kind of scary situation."

Now Crowley is pushing for a change in Massachusetts law that would force an insurer to prove a person misrepresented his well-being or should have known he was not in good health based on "active symptoms of a serious change in health" in order to deny a claim. Under current standards, the responsibility rests with the insured person to prove he didn't know he was ill.

The company, which has since settled with Crowley, acknowledges that it changed its own policy several months ago and is now supporting Crowley in his fight for the legislation, dubbed "Jenny's Law."
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