Fidelity Life has a brand, they say they are the New Zealand Insurance company, yet when you ring them almost exclusively you get a South African accent. Even their tame psychiatrist Anthony Asteraidis is a South African.
That isn’t so bad. When you check their website to find out just how wonderful they are you get nonsense like this:
Our values
Being part of Fidelity Life means you are part of an extended family of New Zealanders. We have a wide network of talented people who are dedicated to making Fidelity Life a friendly, progressive and trustworthy insurance and investment company.We strive for both excellence and integrity, and see all our staff, suppliers, policyholders and advisers as PART OF OUR BUSINESS – PART OF OUR FAMILY.
Our values are:
- Listening & Responding
We engage in dialogue to create value through our relationships.- 100% NZ Owned
We retain our original focus to “keep faith” and care in times of need.- Stewardship
We make wise and prudent use of resources entrusted to us for safekeeping.
Let me tell you line by line exactly what that crap all means.
For the privilege of paying your premiums you would expect them to mean what they say. That is true while you are paying your premiums and not making claims. The agent even pretends to be your best mate as he swans off to South Africa on a Fidelity Life funded holiday. When the crap really hits the fan though what you get is treated like the unwanted idiot son of your cousin, the guy who shits himself in public and plays with poo. You know, everyone has a relative like that. That is what Fidelity Life means when they say you are part of the family.
They aren’t lying, what they mean is that you are part of the family that they would really rather not have to talk about.
Let’s talk about “a friendly, progressive and trustworthy insurance and investment company” shall we. Fidelity Life has put 5 case managers on me. Some couldn’t have cared a fig for me, my welfare or anything else. Just so long as I sent my forms in they cared enough to check to make sure that if I had forgotten they could stop a payment. One case manager in particular was assigned to me to get rid of me as a client. She told me that. She told me to my face that I was a difficult customer and that she was going to sort me out. She even told me after the first time they cut me off with no evidence or reports to justify their actions that this was to “tune me up”. She said it at Fidelity Life‘s HQ in Grafton. She is also the one who told me that I should really just go and book in a series of ECT to get the pain over and done with. I’m serious and I’m not making this up. That is exactly what she told me to do. I remember that day like it was yesterday, I even remember Raylean’s name and I remember that she too was a South African. This is the caring , trustworthy insurance company called Fidelity Life.
Trustworthy is an interesting claim to make, particularly when you send Private Investigators after you. They were dumb private investigators though because I caught them. It isn’t really trustworthy either to send letters to you booking appointments with Fidelity’s tame doctors to highlight in bold that if you fail to make the appointment then your payments WILL cease. Yep, just like that, bold and underlined. No matter that they plan to cease your payments anyway once they conclude with their doctors.
You see this trustworthy, friendly insurance company called Fidelity Life sent me along to their doctors. What they didn’t say was that they had specifically asked those doctors to find out specific things. Only one doctor had the honesty to tell me before the meeting what the purpose of the meeting was. One thing they wanted to know was whether I was taking illegal drugs. Another was if I was malingering. The answer that all of those providers to Fidelity Life was emphatically no.
The trustworthy Prof. Gorman, sent me to see a psychologist to conduct some test to see if I had an underlying head injury. Just in case there is something untreated, don’t worry, mate, it is just some routine tests. Not surprisingly both Prof. Gorman and Ralf Schnabel found that no I didn’t have a head injury, that yes I did suffer from above average depression amongst other things like hypo-mania, and hyper-vigilance. They used these reports to say that I was fit for work because my cognitive functions were high.
I had made a claim for and been accepted for depression, and not although I still suffered depression, and indeed, one eminent doctor has said that the ongoing actions of Fidelity Life have cause me to under go three additional severe depressive episodes, but because I have high cognitive functions and no brain or head injury I was now unilaterally fit for work and the payments were suspended forthwith. Oh and for a nice see you later present they offered me $50,000 just so long as I signed a piece of paper that meant that I could never, ever claim for depression again for the rest of my cover of 25 years. They were ending the claim unilaterally without discussion, transition or anything else, and ending any further claims for the next 25 years and trying to get away with that for $50,000. Nice trustworthy Fidelity Life.
Think of it this way. If I had cancer and made a claim and Fidelity Life accepted it, then subsequently sent me for test to see if I had three testicles and then came back and said “Great news, you don’t have three testicles, you can return to work”. I would still have cancer and still unable to work, but not in the warped world of Fidelity Life.
So you see dear readers, you mustn’t really believe what insurance companies write on their websites. They like to obscure the reality of how things work. They would like to obscure that people will lose their houses, be impoverished, place their marriages in jeopardy, all because they have no integrity, do not honour contracts and cast you aside without a care int he world despite their flowery words.
I think I might start a campaign for an inquiry into the life insurance industry, the claims that they make in publications, and their deliver of service. I mean it would be a good idea if National are to consider opening up ACC to competition to conduct such an inquiry to ascertain whether or not private companies like Fidelity Life can be trusted with aspects of the ACC account. Perhaps a select Committee inquiry? Yes I think that is a fine idea.
