On the morning of March 16, less than 24 hours after closing her restaurant the Banty Rooster in New York City’s West Village, Delores Tronco-DePierro filed a business interruption claim to her insurance company. In the days leading up to the closure, diners, encouraged by government officials, had been attempting to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus by limiting social contact, including dining out, making running the three-month-old restaurant financially unsustainable.
“For lots of small business owners this is precisely the type of situation you have insurance for,” Tronco-DePierro says. “It’s unconscionable that insurance companies would say ‘We have no responsibility for this.’”, business owners have pored over their insurance policies with hopes of discovering a safety net, only to learn that insurers are unwilling to payout coverage for losses tied to the pandemic.
According to Alan Lyons, chair of insurance and reinsurance at Herrick Feinstein LLP, the problem for restaurants banking on financial aid through this type of insurance coverage, generally speaking, is that some policies contain clauses excluding cases of viruses and bacteria. The clauses have been added in recent years, after the outbreaks of epidemics like SARS in 2002 to 2003 and Ebola in 2014.
“This industry has so many jobs and the insurance industry is doing nothing for it,” Stuckey says. “The more you look into it, we’re all waiting around the country for small business loans, but wait a sec, why are all these restaurants going to take more debt on? Put this on their balance sheet because the insurance companies are blocking us.”
thegoods Insurance companies not paying
streetgourmetla Because insurance companies are blood sucking deadbeats...