[jocko]

Sound familiar?
Much of this information is also elsewhere on the site, but this media collage will get you up to speed on just how corrupt and evil UNUMPROVIDENT is. Then we suggest reading the HORROR STORIES for personal tales of misery and destruction of life that UNUM causes so they can fill their greedy pockets. Our horror stories show that UNUM has an especial hatred for medical professionals, such as nurses - kicking these angels of mercy to the curb when they become disabled while saving the lives of others. We would like to thank the Bourhis and Wolfson law firm for this useful collation and their yoeman work in exposing the criminality of UNUMPROVIDENT. Editorial comments are our own.
Disability insurer is under fire
Legitimate claims denied, suits say
FRONT PAGE San Francisco Chronicle
Carolyn Said, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, October 6, 2002
The nation's largest disability insurance company has been accused of systematically denying legitimate claims from seriously ill customers, a corporate strategy allegedly concocted for one purpose: boosting profits.
Hundreds of lawsuits from the Bay Area to the East Coast claim that insurance giant UnumProvident deliberately terminated disability payments to customers who were debilitated. As a result, the suits say, people suffering from brain damage, cancer and other critical ailments that prevented them from working were sometimes left destitute.
"It's a real tragedy because these are people who bought insurance believing it would be there if they got sick, and instead the promise was broken," said Jamie Court, executive director of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, a Santa Monica nonprofit that studies the insurance industry.
Among the policyholders who say their claims were wrongly denied is child psychiatrist Stuart Gluck of Cupertino, who has AIDS and underwent a triple bypass for an unrelated heart condition. After he started suffering severe memory lapses, he realized -- and his doctor concurred -- that he could no longer see patients.
But after several months of payments, UnumProvident said he was able to return to work and stopped sending checks.
"My reaction was horror," he recalled. "I feared for the loss of my house, loss of my car, my ability to support myself and my son."
Gluck, like others who have sued UnumProvident, believes the company terminated his coverage as part of a practice to selectively target customers who were receiving long-term, high-end stipends.
Court testimony and internal company documents offer some corroboration for the charges.
But UnumProvident categorically denies that it deliberately terminated claims to save money.
"We pay all legitimate claims," said Tom White, vice president of corporate relations for the Chattanooga, Tenn., company. "We review claims thoroughly, objectively and fairly. We apply significant medical resources to assist claimants in returning to work."
Formed from the 1999 merger of Unum Corp. and Provident Companies, UnumProvident also owns the Paul Revere Corp., another insurer. (Many of the lawsuits name its predecessors as defendants.) No. 205 in the Fortune 500, the company had 2001 profits of $994.7 million on sales of $9.4 billion.
White said UnumProvident has one-third of the entire U.S. disability insurance market. With 25 million customers, he said, it is not surprising that some cases are disputed.
Still, the number of lawsuits and the personal anguish they catalog paint a disturbing portrait.
There was the San Francisco court reporter, Susan McGregor, who says she suffers from intense pain caused by repetitive stress and cubital tunnel syndrome. UnumProvident terminated her benefits just before her husband was diagnosed with leukemia.
And there was the Berkeley chiropractor, Joan Hangarter, who said her debilitating back and arm pain prevented her from working. After her benefits were cut off, her car was repossessed, she was evicted, forced to declare bankruptcy and went on welfare.
Ray Bourhis, a partner in San Francisco law firm Bourhis & Wolfson, has represented dozens of UnumProvident customers whose benefits were denied, including Gluck, McGregor and Hangarter.
"You shouldn't have to sue to get an insurance company to pay the benefits they owe you," he said.
Bourhis said the company often claimed that clients were not entitled to benefits if they could perform part of their job. For example, he said UnumProvident claimed McGregor, the court reporter, was not disabled because she could still proofread, and that Hangarter was still able to be a chiropractor because she could do her office bookkeeping.
Chris Collins, senior vice president and deputy general counsel for UnumProvident, said that the company believed both McGregor and Hangarter were capable of returning to work and thus not disabled.
Among the thousands of pages of court documents from lawsuits against UnumProvident, some stand out.
--A May 1995 memo laid out the trade-off between profits and claims in the dispassionate language of a bean counter. Ralph Mohney, now senior vice president in charge of return to work services, wrote to CEO and Chairman Harold Chandler, explaining that the company could save from $30 million to $60 million a year through new "claim improvement initiatives" -- which Bourhis and other opponents say is a euphemism for purposefully terminating benefits.
"A 1 percent decrease in benefit costs due to more effective claim management translates to approximately $6 million in annual savings," he wrote.
"We believe that aggregate improvements in the 5% -10% ($30 million-$60 million annually) range are possible."
UnumProvident's White said the memo referred to saving costs by consolidating claims management in a central location.
-- Two former medical executives with UnumProvident or its predecessors separately testified that the company had a practice of denying legitimate claims.
Dr. Patrick McSharry, a former medical director at UnumProvident, sued the company in June, alleging it denied valid claims and asked its staff doctors to justify those denials. The suit said he suffered retaliation for writing accurate reports contrary to that practice.
Collins of UnumProvident said the company completely rejects McSharry's allegations, which he called "preposterous." He said McSharry was fired in January for being "disruptive."
McSharry's lawsuit triggered a stampede among lawyers suing UnumProvident for denying claims. More than 60 lawyers have asked to depose him, according to press reports.
Dr. William E. Feist, who resigned as vice president and chief medical officer of Provident in 1996 after 14 years with the company, testified in Hangarter's lawsuit that the company held weekly "roundtables" to jettison claims.
"The whole goal of roundtable discussions was to do just that, to terminate claims," he said. ". . . To me, that is unethical."
Feist said the company played hardball, including seeking embarrassing information on clients. "Anything was fair game to try to terminate the claim - - surveillance or financial records, ex-wives, mistresses, whatever, anything was fair game," he said.
White denied those charges. "Dr. Feist slept through most of the roundtable meetings," he said. "Basically the man will say whatever the plaintiffs' bar asked him to say."
-- A court in one lawsuit ordered UnumProvident to provide a list of all lawsuits against it since 1997 in which a plaintiff alleged "breach of contract, breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing and/or fraud." The company responded with a hefty document listing 331 such suits in California and 2,200 in the United States.
Considering that the company handles 400,000 new claims a year (of which three-quarters are for short-term disabilities like a broken leg), that is a "microscopic subset of our claims," White said.
UnumProvident has embarked on an aggressive press campaign since word of a "60 Minutes" investigation got out, triggering a slide in its stock, which is down about 17 percent in the past month. It closed Friday at $17.95, down $1. 17.
The company has set up a special section of its Web site to point out that it pays $3.6 billion a year in claims and has 3,000 employees who work on processing claims. It has issued press releases and written to shareholders and stock analysts, saying the "negative" television profile misrepresents the facts.
For the individuals who became disabled after having bought insurance from UnumProvident or its predecessors, the story continues.
Gluck, Hangarter and McGregor all sued the company.
McGregor, the court reporter, prevailed at her trial and was awarded $1.2 million, but has yet to receive a dime while UnumProvident's appeal is pending.
Her husband died about seven months after the trial.
"I trusted these people; I thought they were honorable and they weren't," she said. "I paid for insurance to safeguard me in case I couldn't earn a living. They totally let me down."
Gluck, the psychiatrist, decided to go public with his story because he feels "what this insurance company has done to me and is doing to scores of other people is unconscionable," he said. UnumProvident has reinstated his monthly payments and says it has settled his case.
His decision to "become a crusader" meant he had to tell his 19-year-old son that he has AIDS. "It's tougher than anything I've ever done," he said.
Hangarter, the chiropractor, won at her trial in February. She was awarded $7.6 million, including $5 million in punitive damages. However, like McGregor,
she has not received any money while the insurance company appeals the decision.
Based on the award, she borrowed money, which allowed her to buy a car and rent a nice house in Novato. That money will run out in another couple of months.
She has a Hollywood scriptwriter interested in her story for a movie of the week, but she's pinning her hopes on a book she works on every day while her kids are in school. It's the story of her fight with UnumProvident. When asked the title, she pauses.
" 'Screwed,' " she said. E-mail Carolyn Said at [email protected]

Insurer's Tactics Rebuked
A judge has ordered UnumProvident to 'obey the law' and make disability payments
Front Page
By Lisa Girion
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

November 15 2002

The nation's largest disability insurance firm is facing a flurryof lawsuits in California and across the country from policyholders who contend thatUnumProvident Corp. cheated them out of their disability payments in an aggressive campaign to boost profit.

The company's tactics allegedly included spying on customers, shredding medical records and using biased doctors to justify its cancellations.

The Chattanooga, Tenn.-based company received a harshly worded rebuke this week from a San Francisco federal judge, who ordered it to "obey the law" and stop targeting certain categories of claims forcancellation, employing biased medical examiners, destroying medical reports and withholding from policyholders information about their benefits.

U.S. District Judge Robert Larson issued the unusual injunction late Wednesday in a ruling upholding a $7.67-million jury verdict for a single mother of two who lost her home and went on welfare after the company cut off her disability benefits.

Citing corporate documents and testimony of current and former employees and an industry expert, Larson concluded that former chiropractor Joan Harngarter's case was part of a broader effort to target expensive claims filed by doctors, lawyers and other self-employed professionals, particularly in California and Florida.

"They planned to save money by terminating claims like hers," Larson said in the order. The company developed a "comprehensive system for targeting and terminating expensive claims."

The litigation has put a spotlight on the culture of an insurer that once handed out a "Hungry Vulture" award to its best employees. A UnumProvident executive said the award was discontinued when it became clear that people outside the company were misconstruing what was meant as a lighthearted effort to boost morale.

In a similar case against the company, a Tampa jury awarded$36.7 million last year to an eye surgeon who claimed that Parkinson's disease left him unable to operate. A class-action suit recently was filed in New York, several lawyers said they were preparing to file additional lawsuits, and the Georgia insurance commissioner's office has been investigating the company's practices in that state for two years.

Lawsuits have pilloried the company for requiring its claims adjusters to maintain and give special attention to "Top 10" lists of certain claims that were costing the company the most and for conducting round-table internal discussions allegedly to come up with ways to deny claims and cut off benefits.

A top UnumProvident executive said Thursday that the company was proud of its claims management practices and believed that plaintiffs' lawyers were mischaracterizing its conduct in a smear campaign designed to bolster their suits. The giant insurer, formed in the 1990s through the merger of Provident Cos. and Unum Corp. and the acquisition of Paul Revere Life Insurance Co., dominates the individual and group disability market.

"We're the biggest target out there," said J. Christopher Collins, a senior vice president. "We have a third of the marketplace, and we've just become their favorite whipping post."

The disputed policies offer what is known as noncancelable, own-occupation disability coverage. Such policies typically are purchased by self-employed professionals to make up for lost income if a disability were to prevent them from working in their specific field. If a policyholder were able to work in another job, he or she still would be entitled to benefits.

One insurance analyst said there were concerns within the industry in the mid-1990s that own-occupation policies were being exploited in some cases by professionals who were not actually disabled but were looking to retire with an income. And Collins of UnumProvident said some industry experts believe fraud affects 5% to 15% of claims.

But plaintiffs' lawyers said UnumProvident brought the suits on itself by cutting off claims and benefits at the expense of policyholders they contend are legitimately disabled. The lawyers said that people who have been terminated by UnumProvident have included individuals with Parkinson's disease, AIDS, spinal injuries, organic brain damage and cancer.

"These are the most vulnerable people imaginable," said Ray Bourhis, a San Francisco lawyer with several cases against the company, including the one before Judge Larson.

"They're disabled. They don't have the energy to take on an $8-billion insurance company, and the company knows it. You sell them this policy on the basis that you will be there if anything should ever happen.... You take their money, their premiums, for 10 or 15 years. And then lightning strikes, and you refuse to pay the claims."

Incoming California Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi, who takes office in January, said he had talked to lawyers involved in some of the California suits and planned to launch an investigation.

"It appears to me to be a conspiracy to defraud individuals," Garamendi said Thursday.

UnumProvident is the subject of an audit in California, said a spokesman for the current insurance commissioner, Harry Low. The spokesman characterized the review as routine.

The company has not publicly disclosed how many of the so-called bad-faith suits it faces on own-occupation policies, but Collins estimated that fewer than 200 have been filed.

Collins said the company planned to appeal Judge Larson's ruling and that his injunction was based on bad evidence.

"The judge has essentially enjoined us to not do things we're not doing," Collins said. "We don't employ biased medical examiners. We don't destroy medical records. And we don't withhold from claimants information about their benefits."

In his 62-page ruling, Larson found support for his order in company documents, including a law department instruction that claims adjusters "shred all sensitive papers that will not be needed for business purposes."

Collins said the document was distributed in the early 1990s and only to employees of the former Provident Life & Accident Insurance Co. He said it had been provided by an outside vendor. Collins said it had been superseded by a newer policy on document retention but that there was nothing wrong with the old instruction.

[jocko]

The New Zealand Government has written the 2001 ACC act so it exactly paralells UNUM Provident policy and procedure. ACCs current Claims Management System was purchased from UNUM Provident.

[doppelganger]

The ACC uses Private Investigators to put down misleading information to be used against you. under the private investigation Act this is illegal.

[happy1]

Is this why Hell anne Clark is trying to look like a Paua,cos shes done that much illegally.!!!

Bet ruthie wishes she could disguise herself as a paua too!!!!!!!!!!

[jocko]

CONGRATULATIONS CORPORATE CRIMEFIGHTERS!!!!!!!!!!!!
STILL GOOGLING UNUM

Put Unum Provident into the web's top search engine and Unum Provident Crimes, linking to our site, still comes up on the very first page, two steps below their corporate site. So basically, you can't look for Unum Provident on the web without hearing about Unum Provident crimes. Gee, this makes me feel so Responsible. I really have to get time and funding to do a top job of renovating the site. I'm almost a corporate presence.

By the way, although we are two steps below the top ranking for the corporate site, if someone puts in Unum Provident, followed by most any derogatory term, we come out above them ;') With Unum Provident Cheats, for instance, we have three of the four top spots on Google. The other spot is a lawyer's site, but they probably pay for ranking, although they are still below us. Beats me why some lawyers don't buy advertising on the site since we are obviously the top ranked site out there. I guess they don't like the format - maybe if I clean it up I could actually support this crazy operation with some advertising. I've never done advertising, though, because I worry about my credibility. The site may look like hell, but I feel it's Very credible. Despite the claims of insurers, and unlike half
what you read in the papers and everything politicians say, I don't make Anything up. Heck, it's more fun to find bad things about Unum. Frankly, they do stuff so rotten I couldn't dream it up so I don't need to - truth is uglier than fiction.

Unfortunately, I forgot to put "sucks" on the site, so I'm missing the Unum Sucks crowd. I'll have to rectify that.