The first long term disability case I had experience with came well before I was a personal injury/disability lawyer.
It happened before I was in law school. It happened to my mom.
She had just gone through multiple surgeries and had not recovered properly, or at all from them. She had been approved for Long Term Disability just before the surgeries took place. She was around 62 years old. After the surgeries, she remained on disability benefits. But shortly there after the long term disability insurer asked that she attend a few “independent” medical assessments with the insurance company’s doctors. She obliged.
Following those assessments, my mom was cut off her long term disability benefits. She was 63 years old, and her benefits were set to expire at the age of 65. She remained at home, in significant pain, and unable to manage her day to day activities of daily living, let along return to any form on employment.
We soon found out that these “independent” doctors who she saw were not really independent. These doctors did minimal to no work through the public OHIP system. Instead, most of their work was generated by referrals from auto insurers, long term disability insurers and WSIB. These doctors did not have a roster of patients who they routinely saw to cure their ailments. Instead, they had institutional clients like insurers, or assessment centres, who referred them people to see on a one shot only basis. After the assessment, they had an army of clerks who would generate reports. The person would arrive at the office for their one and only time to see the doctor. The doctor would check them over, and then someone would generate the report. That report, more often than not went in the favour of the insurer who had referred to doctor the patient in the first place. The doctor would not bite the hand that feeds them so to say.