TORONTO, November 2, 2018 / It should concern all Ontarians that auto insurers are failing to pay the HST on goods and services required by injured MVA victims in recovery. Traumatically injured auto accident survivors are among the most vulnerable of patients and they should not have to fight their insurance company to get what they paid for.
The Ontario government has a duty to protect vulnerable citizens from predatory insurers and to ensure that we have the quality coverage we need if we are injured. FAIR has long been aware of the many oversight failures that have led to this class action and the continuing struggle of accident victims to access adequate resources for maximum recovery.
The IBC and their auto insurer members were known to be among the highest donors to the Liberal government in recent years. That relationship undermined the recovery of tens of thousands of injured car crash survivors who depended on the government to do their job and protect them and not insurer profits. The sum and total of the previous governments failure to regulate has led us to where we are today with a fundamentally broken system since the previous Liberal government “fixes” were heavily tilted in favor of protecting the financial health of Ontario’s private auto insurers at the expense of the physical health of injured claimants.
According to Rhona DesRoches, Chair of FAIR, “Effectively we have ended up with a blended public/private auto insurance. Private insurer profits soar when they deliberately fail to live up to their promised coverage and download recovery costs to accident victims and unsuspecting taxpayers. It is only once in the system that one can see how hard insurers fight to put profits ahead of their customers recovery and how little meaningful regulation there is to protect them from predatory practices.”
“We aren’t buying policies with a ‘user fee’ of 13% in Ontario. While this does not sound like a large amount for a person to pay, spread over many claims over a number of years it means insurers are pocketing big dollars while downloading significant costs to those most injured. In order to recover these ill-gotten HST fees an injured accident survivor would have to take their insurer to the Licensed Appeal Tribunal (LAT) for a hearing where the victim has to pay a fee and even if successful at recovering these expenses from an insurer, they will not be reimbursed for their legal costs for having done so.”
FAIR supports the class action suit and the effort to hold insurers and their regulators to account. We look to the new Conservative government to do the right thing and protect Ontario’s vulnerable car accident survivors in recovery while holding insurers to account for their fraudulent acts.
‘FAIR – supporting auto accident victims through advocacy and education’
SOURCE: FAIR Association of Victims for Accident Insurance Reform http://www.fairassociation.ca/
For further information: fairautoinsurance@gmail.com