Monitoring auto reforms is key: Coalition
View the video here on your mobile device.
The introduction of auto insurance reforms in Ontario has undoubtedly started a lot of conversations with the public and stakeholders in a variety of industries.
What these discussions did was help to underline just how complex the auto insurance system is in this province. Questions of consumer knowledge, accident victims’ rights and system monitoring have all been raised.
We asked Dorianne Sauvé, Co-chair for the Coalition Representing Health Professionals in Automobile Insurance Reform, what she thinks overall of the changes to Ontario’s auto insurance system.
Dorianne Sauvé: I think that there was a lot of effort put in trying to find different mechanisms to look at cost containment but also to look at what they consider to be consumer choice. Where the concern from the Coalition has always been is the consumer really doesn’t know actual costs of receiving care until they are injured. When you’re purchasing your insurance, you’re purchasing with the idea that you’ll never need it. You’re not purchasing it with the idea that this choice that I’m making will have a negative impact on what I’m entitled to. Most Canadians and most Ontarians obviously, don’t really know the actual costs of health care because in their minds, it’s always been covered. Until they have to get into the private system or private insurance system, they don’t really know the actual costs of care. They don’t know the impact of caps because in their mind, $2,000 sounds like a lot if you’ve never had to go out and purchase that kind of assessment.
Our concern is where we have choices being made and how that’s going to be monitored in terms of outcomes for injured claimants. Where you have a cap imposed, will that have a negative impact on accessing care? We really won’t know how that all plays out until after September 1. We can predict where some of the pinch points might be, but we really don’t know the overall impact until it rolls out.
These are all reforms that have all occurred with an absence of real information in order t o monitor some of the concerns of the system. Insurers gather information about costs but it’s not gathered in a unified way in terms of how data is collected, et cetera. We hopefully with have a system through what is called the Health Claims for Auto Insurance system which will mean that everybody submits health claims – medical information, et cetera – electronically and that will be put into a database and there will be information available to all the stakeholders: the insurers, FSCO, providers to really know how the system is running. We didn’t have this up and running before we went into this reform so hopefully now we’ll be able to monitor the impact of some of these choices.
