Stacie Barger's 2015 Buick Encore was totaled in March 2025 after a driver pulled out of a side road off Illinois Route 134 and slammed into her car. Her auto insurer, Farmers, paid the vehicle claim within about 10 days. But settling the injury claims tied to the crash — which involved three passengers, chiropractor bills, a hospital emergency room visit, and surgery for a passenger's hand injury — dragged on for 17 months.
Barger, a McHenry County resident, eventually received $5,000 from First Chicago Insurance, the at-fault driver's insurer, as her portion of a settlement that also drew partly from Farmers, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Her case is now part of a broader story about how long it takes Illinois policyholders and accident victims to get paid — and how much money insurers make in the meantime.
Patrick Hincks, outside corporate counsel for First Chicago Insurance, said Barger's case involved multiple injured parties, a minor, and extensive medical bills and records that had to be sorted out before a settlement could be reached, according to the Sun-Times report. First Chicago offers nonstandard insurance for drivers who don't qualify for policies with more well-known insurance companies, and nonstandard insurers generally have more interactions with their policyholders because they cover high-risk drivers with histories of accidents, traffic violations or poor credit.
The Math Behind the Delay
The incentive to slow-walk a claim, according to consumer advocates, comes down to simple investment math. The insurance industry gains an estimated $8.8 million in interest and investment income for each day home insurance claims are delayed nationwide, and $52.3 million for each additional day that property and casualty claims overall are delayed, per the Sun-Times analysis. A separate joint analysis by the Consumer Federation of America and Weiss Ratings put the broader figure at roughly $241 million in total daily investment income for property and casualty insurers in 2024, with $24.7 million of that tied specifically to invested homeowners premiums and surplus funds. Weiss Ratings prepared that analysis for the Consumer Federation of America.
Douglas Heller, director of insurance at the Consumer Federation of America, said insurers' earnings on funds not yet paid out create a perverse incentive to delay claims. Heller said insurers might move faster if they were required to pay consumers interest on delayed claims, and he has advocated for a 30-day limit for insurers to pay out the depreciated value of what a policyholder lost — after which negotiations over the remaining amount could continue.
Warren Buffett has long referred to this practice — insurers holding and investing premiums before paying out claims — as the float, the same term Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway has used to describe how insurance profits can be generated apart from underwriting. The U.S. property and casualty insurance industry generated a record $89 billion in net investment income in 2024, a 20% year-over-year jump driven by Federal Reserve interest rate hikes and higher bond yields, according to a report cited by AM Best.
Delays and Denials Are Both Climbing
The numbers suggest the slowdown isn't isolated. In Illinois, about 21.7% of home insurance claims took 60 or more days to settle in 2024, according to NAIC data cited in the Sun-Times report. Nationally, an analysis of 15 disaster-prone states by Weiss Ratings found that 28.1% of homeowners insurance claims in 2024 remained unpaid after 60 or more days, up from 25.6% in 2018, per the Consumer Federation of America.
Weiss Ratings' historical data also shows that insurers closed 42.1% of homeowner claims nationwide with zero payment in 2024, up sharply from 25.7% closed without payout in 2004 — meaning delayed claims increasingly end without any money changing hands at all.
Industry groups reject the idea that profit motives are driving the slowdown. The American Property Casualty Insurance Association, the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies, and the Illinois Insurance Association each said the analysis oversimplifies complex claims handling to score political points, according to the Sun-Times. Those groups also said investment income helps insurers keep premiums stable and maintain capital for current and future claims.
Complaints Pile Up Against One Illinois Insurer
First Chicago Insurance's role in Barger's case comes as the company has drawn scrutiny for its complaint record. Per the Sun-Times analysis, First Chicago had the highest complaint ratio among Illinois auto insurers in 2024. That echoes 2023 state data reported by InsuranceNewsNet, which found First Chicago recorded 180 consumer complaints and a complaint ratio of 5.14 per $1 million in private passenger auto premiums — 39 times higher than State Farm Mutual's ratio in Illinois that year.
More recent state figures show First Chicago received 251 consumer complaints in 2025 while collecting $99.5 million in direct written premiums, a complaint ratio of 2.52 per $1 million in premium, according to the Illinois Department of Insurance. The state stopped publishing annual online rankings comparing auto insurers' complaint ratios after 2020, saying state law doesn't require public comparative rankings — a decision that forces consumers and reporters alike to calculate the figures manually from raw state records, the same InsuranceNewsNet report notes.
That transparency gap leaves Illinois policyholders largely on their own to navigate remedies like Section 155 of the Illinois Insurance Code, which allows policyholders who prove in court that an insurer engaged in unreasonable and vexatious delay or denial to recover attorney fees plus statutory penalties capped at $60,000 or 60% of the claim value. Separately, state administrative rules under 50 Ill. Adm. Code 919.80 require insurers to issue a written explanation of delay once a first-party claim passes 40 days unresolved, or a third-party claim passes 60 days.
Weather Losses Complicate the Picture
Insurers argue rising claim costs from severe weather, not investment strategy, explain much of the pressure on the system. State Farm, Illinois's largest home insurer, implemented a 27% rate increase in 2025 after reporting it paid out $1.26 in claims and operational expenses for every dollar of premium collected in the state during 2024 due to severe weather losses, as Hoodline previously reported. That underwriting deficit forms the core of the industry's counterargument: that investment income is what keeps carriers solvent enough to keep paying claims at all.
For Barger, the dispute over macroeconomic incentives was beside the point. Her case, requiring settlement with all injured parties and involving injuries that Hincks said could exceed policy limits, dragged through 17 months of back-and-forth before it closed — a timeline that mirrors the broader pattern consumer advocates say is becoming the norm rather than the exception across Illinois and the country.
