Local voice against wrongful benefit denials not staying silent

Thursday, March, 05, 2015 - 1:01:20 PM

Local voice against wrongful benefit denials not staying silent

BY SHANNON DUFF EXPRESS MANAGING EDITOR

PALMERSTON – Even a rural, small-town voice can make a difference.
That voice belongs to Palmerston resident and insurance activist Jokelee Vanderkop, who even after self-publishing her own book and speaking out on national radio, still hasn’t given up her quest to help legitimate claimants receive the insurance benefits to which they’re entitled.

After fighting for her own claim, a battle that would last 12 years, Vanderkop finished So You Think You’re Covered! The Insurance Industry Rip-Off, which she began penning in 2003. The Minto Express first reported in August 2013 on the book launch and Vanderkop’s experience. Since then, she has only delved deeper into the issue, and “unless I carried on, one book wasn’t enough,” she said in a recent interview.

Vanderkop was involved in a head-on collision in February 1997. The crash cost her career as a secondary school teacher and resulted in multiple health conditions including chronic pain and brain impairment.

At her expense, the automobile insurance provider and employer’s extended health provider battled over providing long-term disability. She explained the process saw her stripped of all her benefits other than a conciliatory stipend by the health carrier while both insurers “duked it out.” She said she learned later that the car insurer had already determined to cut off her benefits regardless of what transpired during mediation — even though she qualified for those benefits.
Vanderkop was without income from 2003 to 2009 and lived on her credit line, existing on $30 per week for groceries.

Now revised, updated and expanded, So You Think You’re Covered! is a tool Vanderkop she says will inform readers on how insurance providers can attempt to deny claims, and what claimants can do to help ensure they receive the benefits for which they’ve been paying.

The process can be long, and not at all simple. Vanderkop’s fundamental warning?

“Having a legitimate claim, medically backed by one’s doctors, is no guarantee that an insurer will pay the benefits for which an individual has paid,” she said.
This is frequently met with denial and even disbelief. More frequently, it’s met with understanding from someone who has been there.

The insurers’ for-hire, legal-medical experts are well versed in how to counter these diagnoses and deny benefits, Vanderkop explained. She said she has spoken to many rehabilitation specialists who work with motor vehicle accident victims and who say some insurers are practiced at denying benefits.

In a 2011 report, the auditor-general stated about half of all injured claimants ended up in mediation.

“Are we to believe that almost one out of every two claimants is scamming and is refused benefits on that basis?” Vanderkop asked.

She has since learned that even the provincial auditor-general in a 2011 report stated that “half of all injured claimants ended up in mediation”. That means that almost 50 per cent of all claimants are denied.

Vanderkop said she refocused her anger into an energetic effort to expose “what goes on for the majority of motor vehicle accident claimants.

Source: http://www.southwesternontario.ca/news/local-voice-against-wrongful-benefit-denials-not-staying-silent/