ICBC’s New “Care Model” Results in Less Care for Injuired People

Before April 1, ICBC let injured people have options, now they do not

On April 1, 2019 the new NDP legislative regime designed to save ICBC money kicked in. The scheme was purported by the Attorney General David Eby to “provide enhanced care for people injured in crashes” by increasing the amount ICBC pays for treatment like physiotherapy or active rehabilitation. The reality on the ground now being realized shows that Mr. Eby is at best a naive idealist and at worst deceptive.

The legislation did indeed increase the amount ICBC will pay for treatment up front, but also capped the total amount ICBC has to pay for each treatment. Therein lies the fine print.

ICBC’s New Policy

Before April 1, 2019, an injured person had the option of going to any clinic they wanted, and pay for the treatment they needed, resting assured they could recover that sum from ICBC when they settled their claim. The legislation now forces claimants to only go to clinics that adhere to ICBC’s policies, because if they go elsewhere and pay one penny more than ICBC’s prescribed rates, they are barred from getting that money back from ICBC.

More importantly, because the amounts ICBC pays per treatment session are not market rates, physiotherapists and other treatment professionals are now doing what is obvious to make the new rates work; they are spending less time actually treating injured people.

As indicated to us by one physiotherapy clinic “…our new session fee schedule will not charge a user fee, but have a reduced time 1:1 physio (20 mins) and 1:1 kin (45 mins) vs the [old] 30 and 60 mins respectively.”

ICBC will surely just say, “Well, to make up for the shorter treatment sessions, injured people can just go to the clinics more often.” Never mind the life disruption of having to book more sessions to get the same result. Or is it the same result? Surely there was a rehabilitative reason why a kinesiologist wanted to see a patient for a full 60 minutes at a time rather than 45 minutes once they started getting paid less by ICBC.

If Mr. Eby believed that highly trained physiotherapists and kinesiologists in this province would simply provide so called “enhanced” care for less money, he wassorely naïve. An alternate explanation is that Mr. Eby’s stated goal of providing care for injured persons is misdirection. Perhaps his real goal is to save ICBC money at the expense of injured people in British Columbia.

Written by Wes Mussio of Mussio Goodman