Rescission is the term health insurance companies use for their practice of dropping you after you’ve encountered catastrophic injury or disease by finding chickenshit errors in your paperwork that they can use to justify canceling your policy.

WellPoint health insurance actually gave scores on a 1 to 5 scale in employee evaluations to encourage the practice. One underwriting executive saved Wellpoint $10 million for doing such a good job screwing people over.

How many of you reading this have Florida Blue Cross Blue Shield? Well BCBS rescinded Robin Beaton’s insurance last year after she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. Blue Cross said this was because she had neglected to state on her forms that she had been treated previously … for acne.

WTF? indeed.

However, under some state laws the practice is legal if done within the allowable time frame (typically up to two years after a policy is issued).

Fortis Insurance Co. rescinded Otto Raddatz’s health insurance after he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma because Raddatz did not include in his paperwork a prior CT scan showing an aneurysm and gall stones.

The kicker … Not only had Raddatz’s docter  never told Raddatz about the results, but they were “very minor” and didn’t require treatment.

The outcome? Fortis refused coverage until the state attorney general intervened. The delay caused Raddatz’s window of opportunity to treat the disease to shut, and he died.

I’m not saying the current healthcare reform package is the best answer to our healthcare disaster … but it does outlaw recission.

In a welcome turn, the Bar has backed off of one of its numerous absurd advertising rules. Lawyers are now allowed to use the word “trust” in our advertising.

The Florida Bar prohibits lawyers from describing the quality of our services. For example, we can’t say we’re great lawyers. I’ve opined a little on that at this I Am Not Legally Allowed To Say I Am the Best Florida Lawyer Blog post.

For some time, the bar prohibited lawyers from using the word trust in advertisments because the bar considered that to describe the quality of a lawyers service. What they forgot is that lawyers are required to be trustworthy.

We are bound by our oath and by the bar’s code of legal ethics to maintain lawyer/client confidentiality. Let’s review the logic of this one: the bar requires us to be trustworthy and then forbids us from telling the public that we’re trustworthy.

I’m glad to see this rule taken off the books.

I agree with these rules. Look at my soon-to-be-demolished website. I do not make such claims there. I agree with the Bar that they can be misleading and harmful to consumers. They can be harmful because they do absolutely nothing to help consumers choose the best lawyer for their situation. This unhelpfulness is illustrated nicely by a scene from the movie Elf starring Will Ferrell. He plays a human who was raised by Santa’s elves in the North Pole. One day he travels to New York and stumbles upon a coffee shop that boasts it sells “The World’s Best Coffee.” He, being innocent and naïve, runs into the shop to congratulate the staff loudly on such a superlative achievement. The shop’s patrons look at him like he’s crazy of course. Everyone know that describing yourself as the best is a meaningless and hollow claim unless the topic is something quantifiable like world’s fastest man in the 100meter dash. So I agree that lawyers should not claim to be the best lawyers. However, I have many problems with the way the Florida Bar enforces its rules. The topic will surface again and again in this blog. In future blogs, I will discuss the more controversial aspects of lawyer advertising. It is for the most part rubbish and we have the Florida Bar’s enforcement division to thank for that. It’s not the rules; it’s the hard-line, heavy-handed, rote, color-by-numbers enforcement of them.