Madeleine Flannagan has a shocking story about her treatment at the hands of ACC. The story is hauntingly like my battle with Fidelity Life.
The tactics are strikingly similar. Dodgy practitioners giving dodgy diagnosis to suit insurers. In her case a retired orthopedic surgeon by the name of Brian Otto. In my case it was three doctors in the pay of Fidelity Life, Dr Anthony Asteraidis, Prof. Des Gorman and Psychologist Ralf Schnabel. In both of our cases the reports of these charlatans bear no resemblance to reality and yet the insurance companies rely upon their dodgy medically un-supported diagnoses to get rid of troublesome clients.
It is high time that there was a parliamentary inquiry into the practices of all insurance companies in New Zealand, including ACC. the inquiry should focus on how insurance companies deal with long-term clients and their removal from their books, the processes used to remove them from the books.
A look through ACCForums should be enough to give any politician the colly-wobbles with how ACC and private insurers are operating here. To my mind their predatory practices are far worse than any action by Banks, and we have had inquiries in to them and their business activities.
The bright light of an inquiry should be focused on the insurance industry. Right now it is up to individuals to get the wherewithal together to sue them to bring them to account. The insurance companies know that few of their clients can afford to do this and so they keep on smashing people around.
The Insurance Ombudsmen has the threshold so low as to be useless, and before you can even get their you have to get the insurance company to declare that the issue is “deadlocked”. People’s lives re being dramatically affected. Worse still nearly all of these insurance companies are also offering up Kiwisaver accounts, with no declaration on where their substantial funds are being invested.
Lobby your MP for an investigation in to ACC and insurance companies.
