114 Ga. App. 392 | Ga. Ct. App. | 1966
There was direct testimony by the manager of appellant’s company who was handling Bearden’s disability claim that all disability claims cleared through him, that Bearden’s claim had been rejected, and that the appellant had not been paid. Bearden offered testimony that he had a conversation with an unidentified employee in GMAC’s Macon office where he went to see whether a letter written by his doctor on January 2,1964, had been received, that the man told him that everything had been received, everything had been taken care of, and that everything was all right. Thereafter he said: “As I stated earlier, it was in February or March of ’64 that I was in Macon and I went in there for that sole purpose. To see if they had received this report and if the insurance claims were being filed properly,” and that the company demanded no money from him at that time. At another point in his testimony he was asked: “So when Mrs. Sloan wrote my son on November 30, 1963, in which she said that she was fixing to amend the suit against Prudential Insurance Company for the payments which had.not been made, you knew that no payment had been made since you filed this suit on February 15, 1963, didn’t you?” to which he replied in the affirmative. Construing any ambiguities in the plaintiff’s testimony against him, as we must (Southern R. Co. v. Hobbs, 121 Ga. 428 (1) (49 SE 294)), the plaintiff knew at the end of 1963 that the insurance company, which had previously denied the claim, had not changed its position and had made no payments. He testified to nothing which would have caused him to think the position had been changed between then and March, 1964; he went in to the office to see whether the creditor had received and forwarded a letter from his doctor which was a part of his effort to get the insurer to change its position; he asked whether the letter had been received and was told that “everything" had been taken care of. The “everything” logically refers to the preparation of the claim, not its payment. “The creditor shall not be designated as claim representative for the
The trial court erred in overruling the motion for judgment notwithstanding the verdict.
Judgment reversed.