As someone who’s been put through the wringer by a job before a lot of what this employee is saying is familiar to me. There’s a couple details of the story I’d like to focus on, though.
His doctor diagnosed severe burnout and prescribed time off work and psychotherapy.
But when he applied for short-term disability to take that break, Manulife — which provides insurance benefits for RBC — rejected the claim.
Why is this even a thing? The guy got his prescription, who is a private company to tell the guy his doctor’s prescription is wrong?
Manulife initially rejected the employee’s request for short-term disability because because the company doesn’t recognize it as a condition that’s covered.
When he returned to his doctor for further medical testing, he was also diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and major depressive episode — not uncommon, according to Alani-Verjee.
“Burnout kind of becomes an umbrella term for those major depressive symptoms and those anxiety symptoms,” she said.
Armed with that diagnosis, the employee tried again to get short-term disability coverage. But again, Manulife declined.
In a letter to him, which Go Public translated from French, the insurance giant outlined its reasons.
Among other things, Manulife said his condition was not severe because he was not prescribed medication, only therapy — an argument which frustrates Alani-Verjee, who says using psychotherapy as a first line of treatment is common and recommended.
This is why we must fight against the privatization of our healthcare. Financial arguments aside, is this really the future anyone wants? Where the treatment prescribed by our doctor is unavailable to us because a private entity who’s primary motivation is profit will do whatever they can to weasel out of having to provide that treatment?
The financial planner says when he told his manager that his mental health was suffering and he needed time off, she didn’t listen.
Instead, he says, she encouraged him to get back on track, saying she had confidence he could do the job.
“She would tell me she cared, but I wouldn’t see any real concrete action from her part,” he said. “They talk about mental health, but I’ve seen no help whatsoever.”
Back to the topic of the article, this is about what you can expect to hear if you do get into a burnout situation. For all that mental health gets talked about in this day and age, the reality is, your health is only of interest to the extent that you’re able to be at work and do the job. In terms of your long term health, most bosses aren’t going to care about that. Whatever it takes to get you back on the floor so they can squeeze those last drops of juice from you.
I don’t know when insurance companies figured out that just saying “you’re not sick” to anyone making an insurance claim is an excellent cost-saver.
We’ve got to legislate that out or initiate a class-action lawsuit.
Insurance companies don’t make money by approving claims. The job of a case manager or insurance adjuster is literally to tell you that you aren’t covered, as much as possible, as often as possible.
To that extent, health insurance providers have their own doctors on staff, who will give evaluations that are favorable to the company. You agree to be evaluated by the doctor as part of your policy contract. This has been going on forever and that’s why insurance providers make money.
Am a doctor and while I agree this is shady AF and should be further controlled, we do at least have some requirements. An insurance company has to use a licensed doctor, so their privately funded third party opinions don’t usually come from someone employed by them; just chosen by them. I’ve actually never had an outside opinion requested by insurance that overturned my initial diagnosis, and many times they actually help with new treatment suggestions.
What happens in my experience is that if they want to keep dragging it out, which they always do, insurance will just continue to try to claim that the original doctor and the outside party requested by insurance don’t really know anything and actually Karen the Case Manager at Manulife is the real expert. I’ve had that happen three times in the last two years. Frustrating though it was, the scathing letters I got to write to the company were sort of cathartic.
I think a very good start for all of this is that we should be generating the terms and paperwork at a provincial level and requiring all insurance companies use the same forms. You want a doctor to fill out your paperwork? Use the paperwork we’ve agreed on then. The first way they start miring people down is by sending out twenty page forms asking for every little detail of your medical history regardless of the claim, wasting huge public resources from doctors. From there it would be easier to standardize practice for insurance companies so that we have more ways of holding them accountable when they try to claim that the provided evidence is sufficient.
Edit to add: I don’t know if most people realize this but a lot of the time once the doc has given a diagnosis insurance isn’t actually trying to refute it. They’re trying to drag everything out until the patient is too exhausted or broke to fight anymore. It often works, they’re forced to go back to work because otherwise they’ll starve. Insurance doesn’t have to prove anything, just delay.
Similarly, insurance will cut off long term disability claims when there’s no end in sight because it’s cheaper for them to pay out a settlement than continue to pay LTD indefinitely.
All it takes is one person to get pushed way over the edge and we’ll be back to work place shootings
His account is basically word for word what happens in pretty much any corporate environment (at least in Canada).
I work for an organization that has hundreds of thousands of workers and burnout without coverage from insurance is a major source of turnover. We do an annual mental health survey and it’s all just for show because for the past 10 years the org has a steady decline in average happiness scores.
Senior executives give lip service about how “concerned” they are about the scores and how “we need to do better” and then it’s back to business. Same old same old.
At the end of the day they only care about profits.
That’s probably why my last two employers moved from Shepell FGI where we had access to actual psychologists with full on sessions to Dialogue where you can only talk to a social worker for 30 min at a time and only focus on one topic. The new service is probably cheaper.
Solution largely is working less and bosses who ain’t dicks… This is something that the org needs to fix. Consultations with mental health professional will not fix this root cause.
True. But you only need one dick at the top to put the pressure on the whole hierarchy of people and suddenly everyone turns into dicks, especially when their paycheck is concerned.
Ah we had Mourneau Shepell as well. Now our EAP has 6 consultation limit per person.
One way you can game this is to get your kids and other household members to call in for you with your issues. Then you get 6 more consultations!
Wow.
Fuck Manulife and fuck RBC.Paraphrasing:
“Not serious enough because they’ve only been prescribed therapy and not medication.”
“They can manage to get out of the house once a week so it’s not completely debilitating.”The article is full of absolute shittakes (not the mushroom).
Next, the company will complain about employee loyalty, wondering why some people move on while they treat everyone like disposable resources to squeeze and discard.
Or maybe just blame “young people don’t wanna work” too, when people avoid your absolute shitstain if a company culture, another classic.Ah, yes, #letstalk
Millions of paper pusher across the world live this clown reality everyday.
It was not always this shiti but last 10-20 years turned office work in dystopian mental illness generator.
Solution is is less work and better work conditions but LeAdERsHIp don’t give two fucks. Fuck you peasants get back to grinding out endless paper and excels.
