DeLauro Challenger Targets Insurers

by Paul Bass

Five insurance company lawyers showed up to court. Tom Egan showed up, too, to oppose them. By himself.

Egan, an attorney, was representing a Shoreline homeowner whose roof got wrecked by a fallen tree. The homeowner’s insurance company didn’t want to pay the claim to fix it.

This wasn’t Egan’s first time facing a posse of insurance lawyers.

“It’s difficult,” he said. “Because they have essentially unlimited money. They can spend everything to defend a case, maybe even more than what the house is worth. It makes it so that homeowners never get what they want, and they just settle for less. It’s a little bit outrageous, in my opinion.”

Now Egan is seeking to take his case against insurance companies not just to court, but to the U.S. Congress.

The 38-year-old Ansonia attorney is running in the Nov. 3 election for the Third U.S. Congressional District seat, which covers New Haven, the lower Valley, and the Shoreline.

He is the endorsed candidate of the Independent Party of Connecticut. He faces Republican Chris Lancia and 36-year incumbent Democrat Rosa DeLauro.

Egan said he’s running to offer voters a “third choice” to the Republicans and Democrats.

“I’ve met Rosa plenty of times. Great woman. I do think that sooner or later it’s time to pass the baton. But I don’t really have anything negative to say about her,” Egan said during an interview Tuesday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.

He is focusing his campaign so far on getting-through-daily-life issues … such as dealing with insurance companies that fight you when you try to collect owed payments.

If elected, he said, he’d pursue legislation to allow courts to award attorney fees to individuals seeking to recover insurance policy benefits. He argued that might make the companies hesitate to automatically fight even solid claims.

At a time of rising evictions (he also does pro bono legal work for tenants), Egan spoke of maintaining funding that helps people who struggle to pay rent. He spoke of raising the $7.25 federal hourly minimum wage. (Connecticut’s stands at $16.94.)

And he spoke of trying to bring back manufacturing jobs. He specifically would seek to revive a plan to turn the abandoned former Ansonian Copper & Brass mill into a 50-acre recycling, solar power and high-tech manufacturing site. He previously represented a company that unsuccessfully sought local goverment permission to pursue the plan.

Asked how a local plant could compete with low-cost Chinese solar manufacturers, he said the idea would be to import already manufactured parts and assemble them here.

In the interview, Egan spoke of boosting high-speed rail and ending current federal immigration raids in favor of a pathway to citizenship for undocumented people already here.

Egan has previously run for Ansonia mayor and state representative.

The Independent Party is running several of its own candidates this year, including Egan. It’s mostly cross-endorsing candidates from other parties, such as Republican gubernatorial hopeful Ryan Fazio, Democratic secretary of the state candidate Stephanie Thomas, and Democratic state comptroller candidate Sean Scanlon.

Click on the below video to watch the full conversation with Independent Party Congressional candidate Thomas Egan on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.” Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.”