Watch auto insurance

Dr. Donna Ouchterlony
Special to The Windsor Star

Saturday, July 25, 2009

Sometime this summer, the Ontario government is going to make changes to auto insurance in the province. If Dwight Duncan, finance minister and MPP for Windsor-Tecumseh, accepts the recommendations of the Financial Services Commission of Ontario (FSCO), your basic medical and rehabilitation benefits will be slashed from $100,000 to $25,000. Yet there will be no required reduction in insurance premiums.

In other words, you'll pay the same, or more, for less protection. The proposed $25,000 will be the limit you'll receive if, for example, you lose a limb, suffer a brain injury, have multiple fractures, or are partially paralyzed in an auto accident.

Why? Because the insurance companies are claiming they need financial relief in the form of millions of dollars in cost savings. They say they're having a tough time of it, although they made more than $2 billion last year. They say they'll have to bring in significant premium increases if they don't get what they want.

And so here we are, with the government being forced to choose between premium hikes and benefit reductions. My fear is that the government will opt to cut basic benefits -- if not by 75 per cent, then by some other amount -- because it is the lesser of the two politically troubling choices. If premiums rise dramatically, there will be instant public outrage. The impact of stripping away benefits is not as obvious, or as immediate.

But as a medical specialist who has been involved in the treatment of hundreds of seriously injured automobile accident victims for many years, I can tell you that lowering benefits would be the worst possible decision that the McGuinty government could make. In fact, a strong case can be made for doubling benefits to $200,000 to reflect the fact that they have not been adjusted for 13 years.

Cutting benefits will mean thousands of Ontarians seriously hurt in car crashes every year will not receive the necessary treatment. Their insurance benefits will run out far before they get better. "So what," you may say. "I'll still have publicly funded health care to look after me."

But what people do not realize is that OHIP funds only about 10 per cent of the rehabilitation services required by crash survivors. Many services have been de-listed or are unavailable, and waiting times are so long that timely intervention becomes almost impossible. The public health system provides only the minimal amount of therapy, not what is best for the patient or what will lead to the best outcomes.

If Queen's Park cuts back benefits, there will be a huge cost to our society. The majority of the accident victims are young people, and many will lose whatever chance they had of regaining as normal a life as possible and returning to work.

The FSCO recommendation states that people will be able to buy additional coverage. But people typically do not buy up. They try to save money, especially in a recession, and believe they'll never need the extra insurance. "It will never happen to me," they reason.

But it does happen. Some 12,000 people are seriously injured in car crashes every year in this province. Capping benefits at $25,000 would be an incredibly short-sighted move. It would abandon crash survivors when they are most vulnerable, and it would deny adequate therapy to all but the rich.

Dr. Donna Ouchterlony is medical director of the Brain Injury Clinic at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto.

This is very important. Ontario's insurance rates is way out of the roof anyways. Insurance companies needs FSCO to put some limitations to avoid further premium increase.