When Insurance Doesn't Offer Assurance

Reading Liberally Page Turner
by Amanda Milstein, Living Liberally

(A quick word before you read on - the review below is the last in-house work by Amanda Milstein, our incredible winter intern and indispensable partner for the last several months. While we doubt this is the last you'll see of her work on Open Left, we want to wish her the best as she heads off to get a master's degree in public policy, including a stint at a think-tank this summer. Thanks, Amanda!)

Ray Bourhis, author of Insult to Injury, is an angry man. He has good reason to be—he is a lawyer that has spent much of his career attempting to get insurance companies to pay disabled people the money that they are owed, and has seen his efforts been thwarted again and again—and seen lives of many of his clients disintegrate as a result.

Bourhis describes the travails of people like Dr. Stuart Gluck, who had three disability insurance policies. He was diagnosed with HIV and also had a nervous system disorder ad triple coronary bypass surgery, sustained brain damage as a result of surgery—this was clearly a man who couldn't work anymore. UnumProvident, his insurance company, decided that despite all of this he should still be employed and they even threatened to demand some of the money they had already paid him back.

The book talks about the insurance industry focused through the case of Joan Hangarter, a chiropractor that needed to stop practicing when she developed extreme pain in her arm and neck. Her disability insurance was then cut off, forcing her and her children into destitution and onto foodstamps. Joan wins her trial, but UnumProvident is slow in paying her the money she was awarded—and does not change its behavior towards other policy-holders.

The book provides a passionate description of how the insurance industry is allowed to swindle clients out of money that they are entitled to. Through describing the personal stories of those whose lives have been destroyed by denied insurance claims and a painstaking description of Joan's trial, Bourhis paints a picture of a society that values the corporate bottom line more than the lives of disabled policy-holders.