Great-West Life Disability Insurance Reviews

This company is a total fraud. Broke my elbow and they denied my claim. Over and over. Appeal after appeal. Documented disability as it’s on an X-ray and still denied. I don’t know how these people look themselves in the mirror and live with themselves knowing that every day they literally ruin people’s lives.

Paid into the LTD program for over a year. Drunk driver hits me on my way to work. I am now suffering from chronic headaches and migraines and vision problems. Submitted a request for LTD in October 2018 and it's half-way in January 2019 and it's still "pending medical approval from our consultants"? If you send ANY document to your claims adjuster, you are now in a mandatory two-week queue prior to your claims adjuster even looking at it. This includes an attached document that is REQUIRED to be sent. GWL is so reluctant on giving out money but so easy to take your monthly LTD payments by you and your coworkers. They don't care about your financial situation or even remotely show compassion towards your disability. They treat you like criminals. With 20-20 Hindsight, I would strongly discourage any company from joining GWL's poor service. Scroll up, Scroll down. The same thing I wrote has been mentioned over a hundred times and nothing has changed.

Great-West Life does not care if you are ill. My experience with them has been horrible. There is no credibility nor transparency. Their customer service is absolutely horrid.

If you have a choice, stay away from this company. They will do anything to not pay your claims. i.e. multiple short-term disability claims of my colleagues have been delayed in payment for months after their disability period. Cancer medication claims have been ignored over and over again. One of my colleague's husband passed away more than 6 months ago and there are still no payments. You can imagine the financial stress this creates. For myself, basically, every claim in the region of 100 $ + (over one hundred) is "randomly" selected for audit half the time then ignored after successful completion of the audit. The customer support line phone always has a busy tone. You simply cannot reach them. The online written requests get no answer. If you escalate to your company administrator, they will make statements that they tried to call you three times to clarify. They will state that you as a customer ignored them and therefore they do not pay. I can go on and on with these stories... Overall, this is a full-on fraud company.

Great-West-Life is a horrible company. They denied my application for LTD benefits despite the fact that my doctors supported my claim. I’m suffering from extreme anxiety, and stress at work on top of that chronic pain from work-related injuries and yet they told me there’s no reason for me to go on disability and I should go back to work. Hope this company will shut down. They really try their best not to pay you from what I can see. Of course, their workers do their best to deny you. That’s their bread and butter. Their workers’ mission is to take advantage of somebody’s misfortune. Who cares if you are suffering. All they care for is taking money from you. They are not there when you need them. Like so many people say here, they are lying thieves!

Applied for LTD end of August, gave all the information they required, of course, they required more information from the Doctor, Doctor submitted it. After a couple months of no income, what do you think happened with my claim - you guessed it...denied. I spoke with my Doctor after receiving the denial letter, he was shocked. He told me that I am unfit to work at my current job or any other job at this time. So now what??? Thank you Great-West Life, I am so glad I paid into LTD only to be denied. Will never deal with this company again.

LTD claim has not been processed after 1 month of submission. Very inefficient. No concern

My experience was horrible with GWL. The case manager was ignorant, rude, illogical, unfair, deceptive. Despite my medical MRI with severe neural stenosis, they reject my case with deceptive, barbaric, sub-standard and uncivilized policy. Shame on my employer, the worst authorities to work for. I regret paying 20 years to this reptilian, greedy, inhuman company. We live under dictatorship and chaos. No wonder why we have a chronic shortage of skilled workers :( Our history is full of abusive policies which puts Canada down in the eyes of "well-developed" countries. The medical system is doomed to crash and if nothing else, suffering will do the job to wake us up.

The case manager of my short term disability stopped my benefits claim by changing my original injury claim of a dislocated shoulder to a strain/sprained shoulder muscle. Then the case manager took what a consulting physician said in a report and twisted it, omitting other medical facts of my file, facts that would keep me in the system. The manager only used those utterances to justify her argument. Basically lied to cut me off. Right now I'm in the second appeal stage, appealing to the very people that are causing me the problems. This is borderline criminal behaviour. And I'm still off work.

I started getting dizzy and sick spells at work, so went to hospital! The first diagnosis was vertigo, so they put me off for 2 weeks until I could see my family physician! His first diagnosis was vertigo and he referred me to ear Dr and sent me for tests and put me off for a month until my next appt! All this being sent to my work and Great-West Life! Dr appts blood tests, ear specialist - ear tests, CT scan etc. Went on for next several months with everything being sent to Great-West Life and they kept making excuses why they couldn't approve my claim! It wasn't until my CT scan came back with a spot showing up that they decided to review my claim which was 12 weeks from the time I started feeling ill! They had 3 Drs' letters telling them I was sick but yet they said they had to send to their in-house Dr who denied the claim! I had to appeal 2 times and finally it went to upper management for review and they approved my short term after 13 weeks! I was so far behind on my bills and my house had gone to mortgage holders' lawyers to foreclose on my house! To total amount owing to save my house because I missed some payments due to Great-West Life giving me the runaround was 8500 dollars and needed to be paid in full! 3200 for mortgage and 5300 thrown out the window for lawyers' fees! Not to mention my credit ruined also! Totally ridiculous. People pay into this insurance company for security just in case something happens that they are unable to work but yet when the person needs help, they do everything they can not to pay! I'm still ill and had an MRI and something has shown up, so need to go back for more head scans yet Great-West Life is saying I have to wait for all the results for them to even consider my claim! It's been another 12 weeks with no money and now bills are slipping again and I had to ask the Dr to write a note saying I can work when I'm still very ill! I can only make it to work for a few hours on some days and have to go home to lay down and some days I can't even function to drive there! I'm not sure how other group insurance companies are but if your employer is using Great-West Life, they should change companies for their employees' sake! I'm wondering how many lawsuits they have had to deal with over the years because as soon as I find out there is something seriously wrong with me, if there is, I will def be going to a lawyer for the hardship they have caused me! I wish there was a zero or - rating for this terrible company because it's def the worst company I've ever dealt with!