I was injured in 1994 when driving to work. I was immediately immersed in a world of fraud that I had no idea existed. It began with a medical rehabilitation worker who turned out to be a boat surveyor and who hid medical documents from assessors and then disappeared to Florida where he filed unsigned medical reports. It ended with a gymnastics teacher whose unqualified medical report was used to terminate my treatment and benefits and who was later backed up by a pro-insurer physician whose report was so biased and unprofessional that the College of Physicians and Surgeons gave him an ‘oral caution’ for his poor report writing skills.
It was a wake-up call to find out how difficult Ontario’s auto-accident insurance benefits were to access and my insurer spared no effort or expense to disqualify me rather than assist me with recovery. During the course of my claim I was subjected to an absentee and unqualified medical worker, a multitude of substandard and staged assessments, delayed treatment and rehabilitation, IMEs and physician reports that failed to take into account what my own treatment providers recommended, and intense surveillance and intimidation by my insurer who even tried to block the treatment I found on my own. I’ve joined FAIR to make a difference, to end the abuse of MVA victims who are likely as unprepared as I was to deal with challenges of making a claim in a system stacked against them. For some claimants making an insurance claim is as traumatic as the injury of a MVA itself. When the 2010 changes were made, I knew I had to help others whose battle for treatment and benefits would be even more difficult than mine had been.