Here at ThePopTort, we don’t usually cover stories about the disability and health sector of the insurance industry, but this next item is so egregious and disgusting – and it concerns companies that we do know something about, as well as the issue of private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan – that we’re making an exception.
In a series of special reports by the Los Angeles Times, ProPublica, and ABC News (see 20/20 tonight), it is being reported that private contractors who have been horribly injured while supporting U.S. war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, are being forced to fight tooth and nail to receive health and disability benefits from some of America’s biggest insurers.
Chief among them, unsurprisingly, are our old friends over at AIG – you know, the ones who got all that bailout money yet still managed to pay $165 in bonuses to execs, and once blamed its consumer price-gouging on lawsuits brought by “terrorist” attorneys for the injured?
Well it turns out, without those attorneys battling for the rights of injured contractors, many of them would have no recourse at all. Consider John Woodson, a 51-year old truck driver for the KBR contracting firm who lost an eye and a leg in Iraq when his truck hit a roadside bomb. Reportedly, “AIG refused to provide him a new plastic leg and fought to keep from paying for a wheelchair or glasses for [his remaining] eye in which he has 30 percent vision.”
“Everything’s been a struggle, a constant fight,” said Woodson. “I’ve had to argue for everything, you constantly stay on the phone, writing letters, emailing, trying to get things to happen.”
Largely, due to pressure from his lawyer, Toby Cole, AIG eventually agreed to provide him with an artificial leg—though not a new one as his doctor had requested.
According to Cole, AIG has exhibited a pattern of “delaying and denying” the claims of injured contractors. “It’s difficult for me to think it’s anything but a concentrated effort to ignore these guys,” said Cole.
There were 200,00 contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan last year—more than the peak number of military personnel—guarding bases, driving supply trucks, cooking meals, and performing other essential duties. More than 30,000 of them have filed claims for war-related injuries—and 1400 have died. For those most seriously injured, insurers resisted payments in nearly half the cases—and when a worker was killed, insurers filed protests more than a third of the time.
“My husband’s blood is the same as anyone else’s,” said Rita Richardson, whose husband Rod was killed by a roadside bomb while working as a contractor in Iraq. Richardson spent a year “squabbling” to receive her husband’s death benefit. “It didn’t matter that he didn’t have a uniform. He died serving his country."
Comments