FAIR Association of Victims for Accident Insurance Reform
579A Lakeshore Rd. E
PO Box 39522
Mississauga, ON, L5G 4S6
February 13, 2015
Dear Minister Sousa
Thank
you for the opportunity to convey our concerns to the Minister of
Finance office in respect to the upcoming Ontario budget.
FAIR
is a not-for-profit organization whose concern is that Ontario’s
vulnerable auto accident victims are now a very disadvantaged group
within Ontario’s population. Big business concerns continue to eclipse
the fair treatment of injured and disabled citizens who are caught in
Ontario’s dysfunctional auto insurance scheme.
Without
proper consideration from your office and government legislators we see
innocent and often cognitively impaired MVA victims impoverished,
without adequate rehabilitation resources and punished by a system that
no longer functions. Present and past ‘fixes’ have only made the system
worse and the province has incrementally taken on more and more
financial responsibility for the 50-60,000 people injured on our roads
every year. The public unknowingly pays through our social nets when
Ontario’s wealthy insurers fail to live up to their contracts. Further,
these public systems are not designed for, and don’t have the resources
for the care of traumatically injured auto accident victims.
Ontario’s
auto insurers habitually evade their contractual obligations to
consumers and this is substantiated by the numbers when about half of all injury claims (pg 47) must use the courts to hold their insurer accountable.
Access
to benefits hinges on the (highly profitable) expert medical report;
the information and opinion that documents injuries and sets insurers on
a path to adjust claims and injured victims on the road to recovery.
Recovery simply isn’t happening because Ontario’s Third Party ‘expert’
medical examinations and reports are without any standards and virtually
no oversight from their regulatory colleges. Family physician and
treatment provider recommendations are conveniently trumped by highly
paid medical experts whose allegiance is to the business who pays them
and not the MVA victim. Failure to acknowledge and address this harm and
dishonesty is causing not only trauma to victims but also additional
costs to the publicly funded medical system where victims ultimately
must address their injuries. That cost would not be insignificant.
There are now hundreds of thousands of individuals collecting Ontario Disability Support
Program (ODSP) benefits and many of those people are unpaid MVA
victims. This isn’t just a few people who fell through the cracks; it is
a deluge of injured and disabled auto insurance claimants on our public
supports when poor quality medical reports were used to disqualify them
from accident benefits they paid for.
Recent
changes like Bill 15 and the LAT will do nothing to fix the problem
other than to shove MVA victims faster through the still dishonest
system. In fact the incentive of reduced interest payable by insurers on
overdue amounts owed to injured victims will only create more delays,
denials and court actions and the resulting reliance on our public
support systems such as welfare and ODSP. These are claimants whose
access to ‘justice’ is limited to ‘if’ they can afford the expensive
legal representation required to get through the process and so poverty
quickly becomes the barrier to justice and it becomes the bonus to
insurers.
Insurers talk about fraud and the high costs of claims but fail to address their own excessive legal costs and over spending (pgs
58, 59) by consistently spending more on assessments than treatment for
claimants. What about the industry practice of paying $1000
cancellation fees to their IME providers and what does that add to the
pockets of their medical opinion providers and ultimately take out of
the claims dollars?
The
auto insurance system is now so heavily skewed toward insurer interests
and profit that the public is well on the way to be the major payer to
auto accident victims – in other words, we pretty much have taxpayer
funded public insurance. Private companies and their well funded lobby
arm, the Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC), have so successfully slanted
coverage in their favour that it no longer serves Ontarians in either
coverage or cost and has become a system so cumbersome and complex that
it causes harm to those who must use the product.
Insurers have abdicated their responsibility and it requires a twisted form of laws and incomprehensible regulations
We
are auto accident victims and their supporters and we are stuck in a
system where it appears that those who have the power to make this a
fair system now command a premium price for access
for a “better chance of really connecting” with Ministers. This isn’t
something that injured and disabled auto accident victims are prepared
or can afford to engage in. We ask that you act in the best interests of
the citizens of Ontario ALL of the time.
Respectfully,
we cannot have a system where consumers are forced to buy a product
that promises services that are delivered only half of the time and that
downloads indiscriminately to our public supports while causing chaos
in our court systems. All of these actions have a price to the taxpayer
and should be addressed. The answer isn’t calling injured MVA victims
fraudsters so as to justify slashing coverage. Or to prop up an industry
whose business practices include the use of dishonest bogus and/or
biased and indeed harmful medical reports in order to hike insurer
profits. Inaction on these issues ensures that costs of an MVA end up
being passed on to the public. This is something that the Minister of
Finance and the Minister of Health have the power to change through
regulation and enforcement. We hope that you will take steps to control
Ontario’s insurers who thus far are bleeding our medical and support
systems into dysfunction and deficit.
FAIR Association of Victims for Accident Insurance Reform
‘FAIR – supporting auto accident victims through advocacy and education’
How to clean up the inconvenient stench in Ontario politics: Cohn
Ontario is the Central Canadian province that remains the Wild West of political fundraising in this country.http://www.thestar.
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