Manulife Group Benefits Insurance Reviews

In 2010 I had to leave work due to serious health issues. Manulife provides the group health insurance provided by my employer. The application was correct and accurate. I received benefits for the first 4 years, after which a return to work is deemed unsuitable and they are obliged to provide benefits until the claimant is 65. They required testing at this 4 year mark by their own selected health expert and his report *supported* my claim. Despite this, I received a letter saying my benefits were being terminated as I was (miraculously) fit to return immediately to full time employment at my former job. There was no medical evidence to support this decision, quite the opposite. Further, the policy included a clause that claimants do not have to take employment that pays less than 75% of their former salary; all medical reports indicated that the type of work I could now perform without risk of triggering another episode of serious illness did not pay anywhere near 75% of my former (management) salary. The Manulife employee assigned to my file refused to acknowledge the existence of this clause in the policy. Another Manulife employee involved in the file was caught out saying one thing to me and another thing to my medical care provider in an effort to use semantics to cheat me out of my benefits. In short, he lied through his teeth. It was shocking. I had to hire a lawyer to fight their decision to cancel as it was clear anything I pointed out in my defence was being ignored. The lawyer indicated the run-around she was getting from them as she prepared the file was just short of bad faith bargaining. In the end, the unjustified cancellation was reversed - but not before I had to pay over $5,000 I couldn't afford to the lawyer (who basically made the same arguments I had) and had gone through months of intense stress that in and of itself made me more ill. If I had been unable to afford a lawyer, I would have lost my benefits, plain and simple. The truth played no part in it. I have read that disability insurers routinely cancel valid claimants as some of them will not know how to or have the stamina to fight back, and for those who do, it's much cheaper for the insurance provider to deal with an internal review of the termination decision or a court case than pay out substantial benefits to someone in their 30s or 40s 'til age 65. So is Manulife worse than other disability providers? I don't know. I wouldn't trust any of them after my experience.

Our daughter has a heart murmur for which she has never received any treatment or medical intervention. Manulife has only recently allowed our her two siblings to be covered on our group insurance plan, after a full year of waiting. We have had to jump through all sorts of hoops and still our daughter, who doesn't even have to take antibiotics when she visits the dentist, is not a recipient of our family's benefits.

When I do contact Manulife they try to imply that they have no record of my husband's policy, because they never include his certificate number on any correspondence that we've received. I'm curious as to how they suppose that I'm receiving correspondence from them, because they certainly seem to have at least our address! I am very unimpressed with this company and their lack of desire to help.

He/she put me on hold for about 15 minutes and when they came to say they couldn't help me, the customer service representative, (admittedly I was angry by this point), pretended that he/she couldn't hear me. I demanded their name, and they simply continued to pretend that they couldn't hear me. I demanded to speak to a manager, and they continued the game of not being able to hear me....even fading their voice so that maybe I might think that the connection was fading out. I hung up and phoned back and guess what? The customer service rep that I got this time, could hear me just fine! And she was able to help me, quickly, I might add!

I get it, it's not fun to deal with an angry and frustrated customer and I was hopping mad, but just pass me off to management rather than implying that I don't know what I'm talking about or playing games with me!

Sadly the experiences that I've had when I've had to contact Manulife have more closely resembled my encounter with the fading out customer service rep rather than the lady who I later spoke with.

I just want our daughter, who is eight and as healthy as a horse to be taken care of! It's been over a year of waiting!