Somewhere in this process you probably assumed a person was weighing what happened to you. In most cases that is not what is occurring. Your injury is being converted into codes, and the codes are being scored by software.

Understanding the scoring is not cynicism. It is the difference between being surprised by the process and being prepared for it.

Watch on YouTube: How insurance adjusters devalue injury claims and what you need to know

The scoring engine

Colossus is the most widely used system for valuing pain and suffering, operating on a large body of proprietary rules — the video cites over 10,000. It is a closed system, which means the adjuster using it generally cannot audit it either.

One consequence matters enormously and is almost never explained to claimants: the severity score depends on the language in your medical records. If the treating physician does not document findings in the terminology the system recognizes, the score drops — not because the injury is milder, but because the record did not encode it in a form the model reads.

The Consumer Federation of America documented how the tuning of these rules reduces the monetary value assigned to severity points — and recorded the vendor’s own sales claim that the program would “immediately reduce the size of bodily injury claims by up to 20 percent.” Over one decade, CFA found, Allstate’s payout per premium dollar in auto injury cases fell from roughly 63 cents to 47 cents.

The broader critique follows from that: adjusters are no longer exercising judgment so much as entering data into a system that flags any offer exceeding a pre-programmed range.

Tactic one — delay engineered to exhaust you

For an insurer, an unpaid claim is capital that can be invested in the meantime. This is the well-documented economics of insurance float, analyzed in the insurance economics literature (the video attributes this to Harrington and Niehaus).

The behavioral consequence is straightforward. Redundant record requests and procedural friction extend the timeline, and as the timeline extends, the claimant’s financial position deteriorates. Willingness to accept a low offer is not a fixed trait — it is a function of how long you can hold out.

This is why delay should be read as a strategy rather than as disorganization, and why the financial pressure it creates has physiological consequences too. The biology of that pressure

Tactic two — disputing medical necessity

The second move is to ask for a structural lesion and to treat its absence as proof that treatment was unnecessary. No fracture, no procedure.

This silos the injury away from its actual mechanism. Persistent cytokine signaling — TNF-α, IL-6 — sustains an inflammatory state that maintains pain, and central sensitization means the nervous system itself has been retuned so that pain is generated centrally, often independent of the original site.

If pain can be characterized as unexplained, then treatment aimed at it can be characterized as experimental, and denied on that basis. The counter is objective documentation of the mechanism rather than louder assertion of the symptom.

Tactic three — the minor impact soft tissue defense

MIST argues that low vehicle damage means low occupant injury. It inverts the physics.

A rigid frame that does not crumple absorbs less energy and transfers more of it to the occupant. The frame is, in effect, the fuse — and when it does not blow, the load goes elsewhere. Low-speed collisions can transfer substantial accelerations to the cervical spine and head, and the resulting whip can produce microscopic axonal shearing. You do not have to strike your head to sustain a brain injury. How this is proven

The part that is hardest to hear

There is a body of research indicating that claim outcomes differ by race and by geography in ways that are not explained by the injuries themselves.

The best-documented mechanism is not hidden at all, and it is not an allegation: race- and gender-based wage tables.

When an economist projects what an injured person would have earned over a lifetime, that projection has to start from some baseline. A substantial share of forensic economists have used race and gender statistics in building it — surveys of the field put the figure at roughly 44% using both, with a further share using gender alone. Because women and people of color have historically earned less, those tables produce systematically lower projected lifetime earnings for identical injuries and identical qualifications.

The effect is not marginal. In one widely reported comparison, a young Black woman’s projected future lost wages came to roughly half those of a white man of the same age with identical education and an identical injury.

The logic is worth naming plainly: the method takes documented historical discrimination and re-enters it as a prediction about one individual’s future. The disparity is imported, not observed.

You do not have to take our word for it — a legislature agreed

This is the strongest evidence available that the practice was real, because it is not an argument at all. It is a statute.

Martha Chamallas of Ohio State documented the mechanism across US and Canadian cases in Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review (2005), and developed it at length with Jennifer Wriggins in The Measure of Injury: Race, Gender, and Tort Law (NYU Press, 2010).

California then acted on it. SB-41, now California Civil Code § 3361, was signed in 2019 and took effect January 1, 2020. Its operative language is one sentence:

“Estimations, measures, or calculations of past, present, or future damages for lost earnings or impaired earning capacity resulting from personal injury or wrongful death shall not be reduced based on race, ethnicity, or gender.”

A legislature does not prohibit a practice that was not occurring. California was the first state to do so. A federal counterpart — the Fair Calculations in Civil Damages Act — has been introduced repeatedly in Congress and has not been enacted.

What this means if your claim is in Missouri or Illinois. We looked, and we did not find a statute comparable to § 3361 in either state. So far as we can determine, nothing in Missouri or Illinois law currently bars an economist from using race- or gender-based wage tables in projecting your future earnings. If your damages include lost earning capacity, that is a question worth putting to your attorney directly: what tables is the projection built on?

What peer review actually shows about claim adjudication

There is one rigorous study directly on the question of whether insurers pay claims differently by race, and it is worth describing precisely rather than loosely.

Lin, Browne and Hofmann (Journal of Risk & Insurance, 2022) examined earthquake insurance claims from eight Oklahoma earthquakes between 2010 and 2016 — the induced seismicity associated with oil and gas drilling — linking Oklahoma Department of Insurance records to USGS and Census data. Controlling for other variables, they found that claims from areas with higher percentages of Black population were less likely to be paid, and when paid, were paid less.

The study also closes the obvious escape hatch. A skeptic would suggest those areas simply filed weaker claims. The authors tested that and found no evidence that Black, Native or Asian population share was associated with marginal claim filing — and that areas with higher Hispanic populations filed fewer marginal claims.

Now the honest limits, which matter here. This is property insurance in Oklahoma, not bodily injury. It measures area-level racial composition, not an individual claimant’s race. It does not establish that your personal injury claim will be adjudicated differently. What it does establish is that disparate claim adjudication by racial composition is a documented phenomenon in US insurance rather than a rhetorical flourish — and that is a materially different starting point for a conversation with an adjuster.

What we are still not claiming. The source video attributes to the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies a finding that identical injuries receive lower settlements “based on race alone.” We searched for it specifically and could not locate the paper; the assertion circulates widely across legal marketing sites, always without a citation. It is therefore not repeated here. The video also refers to this earthquake research as “the St. John study” — that appears to be a garbling of the lead author’s institution, St. John’s University, rather than an author’s name.

What actually answers a scoring engine

Not indignation. Density.

These systems discount the subjective and reward the documented. That means objective findings — inflammatory markers, diagnostic blocks, neurocognitive testing, biomechanical analysis — alongside specific, dated functional loss. Inflammation, sleep and movement are treated as clinical targets because they determine recovery, and because measuring them produces the record that a model cannot easily discount.

Frequently asked questions

Why does my insurer keep asking for the same records?

Redundant requests extend the claim timeline. Because insurers earn investment returns on unpaid reserves and claimants’ financial resilience declines over time, delay tends to favor the insurer in both dimensions.

Can the wording in my medical records change my settlement?

Yes. Claims-scoring software derives severity from coded terminology in the records. Documentation that does not use recognized terms can produce a lower score for the same underlying injury.

What is the MIST defense?

Minor Impact Soft Tissue — the argument that limited vehicle damage means limited injury. It misstates the physics, because a frame that does not deform transfers more energy to the occupant rather than less.

Is there really evidence of racial bias in claim settlements?

Yes, and the strongest proof is legislative rather than academic: California enacted Civil Code § 3361 in 2019, barring any reduction of lost-earnings damages “based on race, ethnicity, or gender.” Legislatures do not ban practices that are not happening. Separately, a 2022 study in the Journal of Risk & Insurance found earthquake insurance claims from areas with higher Black population share were less likely to be paid, and were paid less when they were. That study covers property insurance in Oklahoma rather than bodily injury, so it does not directly predict personal injury outcomes — but it shows the phenomenon is measurable, not merely alleged.

What should I do if I receive a lowball offer?

Speak with your attorney before responding, and focus on strengthening the objective record — documented functional loss, and testing that does not depend on self-report. This article is not legal advice.

Do Missouri or Illinois ban race-based wage tables?

We could not find a statute in either state comparable to California’s Civil Code § 3361, which took effect in 2020 and was the first of its kind. If your claim includes lost earning capacity, ask your attorney what wage data the projection relies on — the question is legitimate and, in most states, still unregulated.

Where is Injury Experts located?

Injury Experts is at 4477 Woodson Rd, Suite 202, St. Louis, MO 63134, next to Lambert International Airport, serving the St. Louis region in Missouri and Illinois. Call (314) 887-5866 or text (314) 886-5902.

Key takeaways

• Claims are scored by closed software; the score follows the wording of your records.
• Delay is economically rational for the insurer and compounding for you.
• “No fracture, no procedure” ignores inflammatory and central mechanisms.
• MIST inverts the physics of energy transfer.
• Published research reports settlement disparities by race and geography — read the sources directly.

Medically reviewed by Gurpreet Singh Padda, MD, MBA, MHP — Board Certified in Anesthesiology, Pain Medicine, Interventional Pain Management, Addiction Medicine, and Obesity Medicine.

This article is for general education and is not medical or legal advice. It does not create a physician–patient or attorney–client relationship. Decisions about your claim should be made with your attorney.