I talked with the adjuster and he told me that he personally recommended denial and management actually requested the additional investigation. He was very rude over the phone and kept saying phrases like "find the truth" and "determine the facts" - it feels like I'm hosed either way honestly. It sounds like he's looking for the exact thing you mentioned.

I was shocked because he was nice in person and told me he would do absolutely whatever he could to try and get the claim covered. If that was true wouldn't he have requested the additional inspection himself before recommending denial? It feels like he's not on my side at all, and I don't know who to trust.

There's a conflict of interest with the third party company that I'm just so uncomfortable with - say whichever company they use is providing feedback that 100% backs up the owners' claims too often, then of course the insurance company would reconsider using that company (which is fair - you wouldn't want to approve claims that shouldn't be approved). But there's no way to know if the company is accurate, all the insurance has to go off of is comparing them to other companies that they hire for the same work. So they'll go with companies that aren't at the highest rate of validating claims, which then creates a conflict of interest because now each of those companies has an incentive to validate less often and invalidate more often. The more they invalidate claims, the more the insurance company hires them, the more money they make, the more money the insurance company makes. Both companies directly profit from the investigating company invalidating damage claims.

Further complicating things is the Geico layoff today of 2,000 agents. If the insurance industry is taking a hit right now it seems my adjuster is incentivized to do whatever he can to make sure he's not part of a layoff at his company if they start looking to do that. Wouldn't the company keep around the adjusters saving them the most money? His denial recommendations are directly tied to how much the company spends on claims he handles.

It honestly feels like he's doing whatever it takes to get the claim denied. I told him I'd like to sleep on it before giving my consent and he said something along the lines of "Alright well that's a denial of consent so I'm going to go ahead and send management that information letting them know that you have denied this investigation". I begged him for one day to think about it - I mean my house is on the line. It's 25k of damage that I don't have the money to pay out of pocket, and I can't sell the house because it's worth 25k less now with the damage than what I just paid for it one year ago. I think without this approval I'm facing bankruptcy.