Insurance companies’ secret files on your house

This comes via Liz Pulliam Weston of MSN Money.

You probably know that it’s not a good idea to make too many claims on your homeowners insurance policy, because your insurer could drop you.

What you might not know is that a claim could make selling your home more difficult down the road. What’s more, you could find your home’s value damaged or a sale jeopardized even if a previous owner, and not you, made a claim.

Insurers increasingly are using a huge industry database, called the Comprehensive Loss Underwriting Exchange, or CLUE, to drop or deny coverage based on a home’s history of claims or damage reports.

Of course insurance companies are in the business of making money.  That is why they drop houses they think could cost them a large claim down the road.

To my mind, this speaks to why health care insurance companies also look to drop people who are more likely to file large claims or deny people coverage who have filed large claims (see Bill Moyers’ interview with former healthcare insurance executive Wendell Potter).

For more on why the CLUE database exists for houses and what to do to protect yourself from being dropped, see the full article here.  Choicepoint, the company which controls the database, is the same company which had a role in the 2000 Florida election controversy.