CIN is a non-profit Advocate for Insurance and Health Care Reform.
Postings are cut/paste from other sources. @Cinsurancenews #rally4accidentvictims #ABPetition #CPPbacklog
Thank you for signing up with Team Singh in the fight for fair auto insurance rates in Ontario. My promise to you is simple: I'll never stop speaking out on the issues that matter. The reality is that the Ontario Liberal government has the power and the ability to reduce auto insurance rates across the board, and promised to reduce rates for drivers over two years ago. I refuse to let them back down on their promise. I'll keep you informed on our progress and future initiatives in this battle, and feel free to reach out and share your story or concerns. Thank's for the support! Until next time, Jagmeet.
FAIR has put together a paper version of the petition calling for a
Public Inquiry into the medical evidence used in our courts and
administrative tribunals. It is the same as the one we have asked you to
sign online.
The Ontario Legislature ONLY accepts ORIGINAL petitions, on paper,
with ‘hand signed’ signatures. There are strict rules for petitions so
NDP MPP Jagmeet Singh’s office has generously agreed to receive the
paper petition in his office and present it at Queen’s Park.
If you or a loved one were injured in an auto accident, at work or
elsewhere wouldn’t you want an honest, unbiased and qualified medical
opinion/report of your injuries? That’s just not happening in Ontario
for injured and disabled individuals who make a claim for benefits
through their private or public insurers. What if it was your fault that
something happens to someone else? You’d want them to have the best
chance at recovery wouldn’t you?
Please print, sign and circulate the petition because quality and
qualified medical evidence shouldn’t be something we need – it should be
something we already have because there is no real justice without it.
Make a copy and mail the ORIGINAL copies to: MPP Jagmeet Singh, Room
172 Main Legislative Building, Queen’s Park 111 Wellesley St. Toronto,
ON M7A 1A5
Thanks for being part of the collective voice needed for change!
On July 7, 2015, the Financial Services Commission of Ontario (FSCO) released its decision in Arruda v Western Assurance
(FSCO A13-003926, July 7, 2015), providing additional analysis of the
MIG. In this decision, Arbitrator Shapiro found that despite having
suffered soft-tissue injuries in the subject accident, Ms. Arruda’s
subsequent chronic pain diagnosis took her out of the Minor Injury Guideline.......
Accident Benefit
Coalition Victim Survey is for Accident Victims who were injured in
Ontario Motor Vehicle Collisions (MVCs). The purpose is to collect
information regarding victims’ experience in regards to obtaining
Ontario Accident Benefits from insurers. Absolutely no personal
information is collected or shared.
The Accident Benefit
Coalition (ABC) consists of a membership of Ontarians concerned with
issues surrounding the provinces’ mandatory Accident Benefits. It
was founded by NeuroConnect and FAIR Association and is committed to
advocating for Accident Victims in Ontario.
Why is the Ontario government taking away money they deserve and transferring it to the insurance industry?
How nice for the insurance industry. Take money from deserving accident victims and give it to insurance companies.
Instead of increasing the deductible the government ought to abolish it.
There’s no principled reason to apply a deductible....
In August, the
Ontario government passed a regulation that increased the mandatory
deductible for no-fault pain and suffering claims from $30,000 to
$36,540, and one law expert feels that this was done “without any
debate or meaningful notice.”.....
Tammy Kirkwood said the province’s plan to reduce
auto-insurance benefits that was passed as part of the budget earlier
this year will severely hurt crash victims requiring extensive care....
What are the number of appeals backlogged at the Social Security Tribunal? The following comment was made by Fair Association of Victims for Accident Insurance Reform on the Toronto Sun site back in November of last year.
In February of this year Minister Jason Kenney
pledged to wipe out the Social Security Tribunal backlog of 11,000 by
this summer.
The backlog was also discussed later in the house by Mr. Robert
Aubin (NDP).
He said: "Mr. Speaker, on Tuesday the chair of the
Social Security Tribunal confirmed that there are significant delays
in the processing of cases: 14,677 cases are languishing on her
desk."
So what are the numbers now?
More importantly, how would you get rid of
such a backlog of appeals...fairly?
The
Tribunal Chair refuses to acknowledge or respond to my letters as an
appeal applicant, or as an advocate for these disabled Canadians that
have been waiting for years at the tribunal backlog.
Knowing
that these disabled Canadians can't respond our
government has reaped the $$$ in withholding these benefits. Appeals in the take-a-number-lineup because of bad decisions by
Service Canada and their policy of delay, deny, wait for them to die.
In my
case these benefits that my employers and I have paid into
mandatorily since 1979.
Hundreds
protest the Ontario government’s proposed auto insurance cuts outside
Queen's Park in Toronto on June 3, 2015. (Dave Abel/Toronto Sun)
A slugging match recently erupted between car insurance companies and Ontario personal injury lawyers.
The Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC) opened by claiming the public
needs regulatory oversight of contingency fees charged by personal
injury lawyers.
The IBC feels a change is necessary to protect consumers and allow
the government to evaluate the impact of lawyers’ fees on the auto
insurance system.
The Ontario Trial Lawyers Association (OTLA) countered by releasing a study it commissioned concerning auto insurance premiums.
According to the study, prepared by two professors at York
University’s Schulich School of Business, “consumers in Ontario may have
overpaid for auto insurance by between $3 and $4 billion over the
period 2001 to 2013.”
The OTLA urged an independent “thorough and truly transparent” review of auto insurance by Ontario’s Auditor General.
Reacting quickly, the IBC fired back through a press release,
pointing the finger back at personal injury lawyers claiming, “lawyers’
fees are simply too high and have a significant impact on the cost of
auto insurance.”
The IBC supported its conclusion by claiming some lawyers charge 40%,
while others between 25% and 33% of any settlement or judgment.
I doubt many lawyers would dare charge a 40% contingency fee, although even a 25% to 33% fee may be too high in some cases.
But, the IBC forgot to mention clients don’t pay the entire
contingency fee as a good part of the fee is paid by the insurance
company.
To rub it in further, the IBC stated, “In 2013, lawyers received an
estimated $500 million from injury claimants out of their insurance
settlements for bodily injury claims. These are real dollars that never
make it to the claimant. IBC will continue to fight for increased
transparency so that consumers can actually see where their insurance
dollars go.”
But I don’t think insurers want to open the transparency can of worms.
If they want to talk about “real dollars” that don’t make it to
claimants, check out the vast sums paid by insurers for their so-called
independent medical examinations (IMEs), used to belittle or deny
claims.
According to the most recent Ontario Health Claims Database,
insurance companies paid approximately $372 million for IMEs for
accidents taking place in the last four years.
In some years, insurance companies forced almost half of all
claimants to attend IMEs and in each year the average amount paid per
assessed claimant for these exams exceeded the average amount paid per
claimant for all medical and rehabilitation expenses.
Sending claimants for multiple and expensive assessments to
pro-insurer experts is a major contributor to insurers’ costs and takes
“real dollars” out of the pockets of claimants.
That’s not to say lawyers are free of blame.
There’s a long history of lawyers neglecting to act diligently to
expose insurer experts who file partisan reports, sometimes outside
their sphere of expertise, used by insurers to delay and deny claims.
As well, quality control at some law firms is substandard.
The FAIR Association of Victims for Accident Insurance Reform has
recently posted an announcement stating, “ALERT – we are hearing about
more and more cases where time limitations for filing have lapsed due to
plaintiff’s legal representatives failing to meet limitation period
deadlines.”
Then again, motor vehicle litigation and accident benefits claims are
highly complex and insurance company tactics often lead to increased
fees.
And if the insurance industry wants to point fingers at personal
injury lawyers, perhaps they ought to make complete disclosure of the
money they spend on defence lawyers and adjusters to deny, delay and
defend claims.
Furthermore, how much do insurers pay to fund their massive public
relations campaigns -- including political contributions to those in
power -- which they effectively use to portray accident victims as
opportunistic, malingering or just plain fraudulent?
It seems there is a lot of mud that can be thrown at each side in this messy debate.
But while the debate drags on, insurers continue to exact high premiums and lawyers receive handsome payments for their work.
And accident victims? They’re stuck in the middle.
FAIR was not chosen, nor were any
of our members who also applied for an appearance, to speak to auto
accident victim issues and the deep cuts to coverage at the Standing
Committee on General Government in respect to Bill 91.
Below and attached is our
submission to the Standing Committee fyi. As consumers who forced to
buy a product that does more harm than good for half of Ontario's MVA
victims already and whose coverage is about to be slashed in half,
there ought to be a public outcry. So if you paid your premium last
week, by the time Bill 91 passes, you will have $1 million less
coverage if you are catastrophically injured. No rebate, no notice in
the mail, it's just done. You'll find out when you get in an auto
accident or on your next premium renewal in the small print. It
doesn't just affect you, it affects that person you might
accidentally hit with your car, and now that person will also have
only $1 million for med/rehab and only 5 years to collect it (as
opposed to $2 million and 10 yrs right now). As if people who are so
traumatically injured, perhaps in a wheelchair, or seriously brain
injured are magically better in just 60 months. It takes longer than
that for many victims to just get to court to even hold their insurer
accountable.
We pay insurance in that off-chance
that we get in an accident so we, and those we injure, have coverage
and so we won't be dependent on our families and loved ones or a
burden on society. But the reality is that over the past 25 years our
coverage is now only a fraction of what it was when Ontario entered
into the No-Fault insurance system in 1990. We have no meaningful way
to hold this industry accountable except in individual circumstances
and at great personal expense. It's an industry that now poses a
direct threat to our economy when it is the taxpayer who is paying a
premium for benefits that are increasingly difficult to get when you
need them and when you factor in the download to the tax payer
through the use of our public systems.
Something that seems to get lost in
all of the rhetoric and in the complexity of the Insurance Act with
all of the changes and stripping of benefits is this: there isn't
much difference between the person that is 52% whole body impairment
(serious injury) or the person who is 55% or catastrophically
injured. But there's a big difference in the amount of coverage
available. A $935,000.00 difference. Certainly an amount insurers
will fight hard to hold onto. It is these thresholds like the MIG cap
at $3500 (80% of claims) vs serious injury vs catastrophic injury
categories that is feeding the adversarial system and leaving victims
high and dry.
These specialized treatments that
we talk about, and the timing that is so very important to recovery,
aren't available in our public systems and are outside our public
coverage with OHIP. Only a few will be able to afford what is
necessary for a best recovery scenario. The rest will pay out of
pocket if they can. Most will go without. Many will not recover
without assistance. Will it be you? Will it be you that will end up
on welfare or ODSP or CPP Disability? Or the people you accidentally
injured? How would it feel to know the treatment to make you better
is there but you can't afford it? This is already happening to half
of all auto accident victims.
"We take you now to a dark
land where fraud is rife, corruption abounds and the government seems
powerless. No, not some calcified dictatorship in Africa or South
America. This is Ontario, home to Canada’s worst auto insurance
system, a vast subculture of lawyers, health-care operators, inept
regulators and gaming politicians who cannot or will not come to
grips with a regulatory failure that costs motorists
billions." Terence Corcoran http://business. When we talk about fraud (a great
distraction away from the poor coverage and access) we need to talk
about the fact that Ontario's insurers are selling us a product that
only works for half of those who pay and we need to look at the fraud
in the system that allows that to happen. http://www.
Why is our Government allowing
Ontario’s wealthy insurers to slash benefits to the most injured of
auto accident victims?
The 2015 budget is an absolute
windfall for Ontario’s insurers who are the beneficiaries of
Building Ontario Up by building up their already substantial profits
on the backs of Ontario’s seriously injured auto accident victims.
Consumers and accident
victims alike are already being short-changed when the coverage they
purchased isn’t there when they need it. According to the Auditor
General’s 2011 report on auto insurance about half of all
claims end up in court trying to get what they paid for and that
isn’t any more acceptable than purchasing a car and finding out
that the brakes only work half the time.
Ontario’s wealthy insurance
companies have had an "easy ride for over 20 years"
according to the recent Schulich
School of Business report on Ontario’s insurance industry.
Insurers have overcharged Ontario drivers by billions and are making
17% on their investments while claimants, who have paid in good
faith, are left hanging out to dry at a time when they need
assistance.
How can it be that our government,
under the guise of protecting victims, is proposing to cut over a $1
million dollars in coverage for the most seriously injured among us?
How is that fiscally responsible? Victims don’t just disappear when
insurers fail to live up to the promise of coverage; they just end up
on our public support systems at the tax-payers’ expense.
The Budget does nothing to ensure
that insurer claims management practices are fair and there has been
no action on FAIR’s
concerns about the biased and corrupt insurer medical examination
(IME) reports that are disqualifying innocent and legitimate accident
victims every day. The auto insurance landscape should be cleaned up
but instead we see Ontario’s auto insurers being rewarded
handsomely for disqualifying as many claims as they manage to handle
through the biased
medical opinions that have poisoned our insurance system, our
courts, and are causing such hardship for legitimate claimants.
We can only speculate why our
government is under such significant pressure to support the abuses
and dysfunction in our insurance system. The new LAT system and
increasing the $30,000 deductible requires that our MPPs ignore the
Charter rights of all accident victims to access to our courts. We
would like to know why our elected officials are willing to create a
third class citizen by making our courts unaffordable and
inaccessible. It is no small thing to denigrate the most vulnerable
members of our society so an elite industry can profit.
We have no doubt that the new
Tribunal hearings system will benefit Ontario’s insurers who are
still doing nothing about their excessive claims turn down rate
because our Government isn’t even asking that the insurers be
accountable for their shoddy claims handling practices. This inaction
on the insurance file has led to the unprecedented volume of cases in
our civil court system. The new LAT system will be faster but it will
still punish victims and be based on Ontario’s insurers’
dependence on their deceptive and dishonest medical reports.
Ontario insurance is an adversarial
delay and deny business model and profits depend on the turn down of
claims. But who is paying for that? Well, first the victims who
endure the endless bogus medical examinations required by our
insurers in order for them to deny to access benefits. There are now
so many thresholds and quantifiers of injury because insurers and the
IBC work very hard to keep injured Ontarians at the lowest level of
coverage. It’s a simple plan because the more levels of coverage
there are; the more opportunity there is for an insurer to deny the
claim.
According to HCAI
data insurers have consistently spent more on medical assessments
than they do on treatment. There’s a reason for this and it has
nothing to do with returning their customers to wellness; it has to
do with ‘shopping’ for medical opinions until the insurer gets
what they want, an excuse to turn down the claim. All of these
coverage issues are ultimately worked out in our courts at a cost to
the taxpayer. This costs Ontario’s insurers nothing and the biggest
price is paid by the victims who are more likely than not going to
have to pay for their own recovery while caught in the system. This
isn’t coverage; it’s a false impression of comfort that just
isn’t there. It’s now a fantasy of coverage our government is
forcing us to buy.
Even small changes such as the
“require goods and services not explicitly listed in the Statutory
Accident Benefits Schedule (SABS) to be “essential” and agreed on
by the insurer” will become a point of contention and lead to even
more cases in our courts if these changes pass into law.
Many of our members are already on
public supports. There were over 42,000 Ontario Disability
Support Program (ODSP) applications last year and too many of them
are auto accident claimants who are forced to wait many years for
their benefits and who are already going without the treatment they
need for recovery.
There are 61,063 auto insurance
cases on the docket in Ontario
courts, there are over 25,000 claims at the Financial Services
Commission DRS
unit, and many of our members are already on ODSP and CPP
disability so Ontario’s insurers are well on the road to paying
less than their fair share of MVA expenses and we already have a
distorted form of public auto insurance.
Why is the Ontario government
willing to allow insurers to shave more than a million dollars of
coverage from our policies and willing to punish victims in a way we
haven’t seen before? There are about 600 or so
catastrophically injured MVA victims every year and so this will be
an immediate saving of $600 million in just the first year alone.
Victims will be downloaded to the public systems that are not set up
to service their disabilities and unlike the fantasy world of
protecting claimants in Building Ontario Up, victims will be
sacrificed to build up insurer profits. These seriously injured
individuals will face a lifetime of increased physical, emotional and
financial challenges if Bill 91 is passed as is.
We are very concerned about the
changes to the Catastrophic Impairment designation. The direction and
the insurer presence on the CAT Panel haven’t inspired confidence
that the industry will do the right thing here. At one point only 75%
of that Panel agreed that paraplegia or quadriplegia was a
catastrophic injury. Now the potential that the industry will
separate mental and physical injuries as if they were unrelated is
another danger for injured victims and this too will lead to
increased court challenges.
Why is our government indexing the
court deductible of $30,000 for tort claims but not considering
indexing the inadequate $400/wk income replacement for victims that
has also stayed the same for well over a decade now? Here is a clear
demonstration of the imbalance in how our government views auto
insurance when the insurer’s income from the deductible (and it is
the insurer who gets to hang on to that $30,000) is indexed to
inflation and yet MVA victims are expected to survive on an amount
that is lower than our minimum wage and far below the poverty line.
It is an illusion to say that we
are ensuring affordable insurance by allowing insurers to pay injured
victims less and simultaneously be downloading the cost of victims to
the taxpayers who are also the same drivers looking for a break on
insurance premiums.
The system is broken and no matter
how much our government is willing to give to insurers and take away
from the injured, it will still be broken and dysfunctional. We are
asking you to put a moratorium on these changes until further review
can be done to ensure that Ontario’s auto insurance is providing
the coverage we need. We need to look at changing the system, making
it more reliable for victims and easier to navigate. These are
procedural changes that insurers must make and it is up to government
to ensure that they do so.
Thank you for the opportunity to
present our point of view. We think it is important that you hear
from victims and hope that next time the Standing Committee will
invite actual victims to these hearings on issues that affect them
rather than just listening to Ontario’s insurers.
FAIR Association of Victims for
Accident Insurance Reform is a grass roots not-for-profit that
advocates for Ontario’s auto accident victims.
‘FAIR – supporting auto
accident victims through advocacy and education’
FAIR Association of Victims for
Accident Insurance Reform 579A Lakeshore Rd. E., PO Box
39522, Mississauga, ON, L5G 4S6 mailto:fairautoinsurance@ http://www.fairassociation.ca/
In the last speech of politician Hubert Humphrey, he delivered
wise words we should all remember come election time: “...the moral
test of government is how that government treats those who are in the
shadows of life; the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”
Last month, the Ontario Liberal government revealed its latest budget entitled “Building Ontario Up”
but what it does to our auto insurance benefits is actually the
opposite by significantly slashing benefits available to accident
victims.
Critics say the Ontario Liberal government's proposed auto insurance
changes mean people suffering debilitating injuries from car accidents
are going to suffer even more.
In the blink of an eye and the twist in a road 11 years ago, the
lives of two young sisters changed for ever.
Shannon and Erica Deering were teenagers looking ahead to full and
active lives.
Shannon, now 29, had won a scholarship to play softball in
Florida. Erica, now 26, was still in high school but had hopes of
becoming a lawyer.
All that changed in a horrific crash when both sisters suffered
dreadful spinal injuries that left them quadriplegic.
