Using Disability Insurance
How do I make a disability claim?
If you have a disability, and you need to make a claim, you'd contact your insurance agent first. Your insurance agent would make sure that a claim form was sent to you and to your doctor. You would complete the form, send it to the insurance company, and the insurance company would evaluate it. They would probably ask the doctor for additional medical records to verify the type of disability you have, and come up with some ideas on whether or not they think your disability is going to last a long time. Occasionally the insurance company will have you checked out by their own doctor to make sure that it is a legitimate disability. Most of the time if you go to a quality doctor like a physician in your home town, and that doctor is willing to say that you're disabled, the insurance company will not reject that. But on the other hand, let's say that you have a neck injury from a car accident, and a year later you still say you can't go to work. If the majority of people who have a neck injury can go back to work after two or three months, they might suspect that there's something going on that's not exactly honest, so they have the right to have you checked out by other doctors; their own doctors, at their expense. If they choose to not pay you, and you feel they are not being honorable with you, you will obviously contact your insurance agent, and you'll probably contact an attorney to fight for you, because you cannot be left without money when the insurance company promised it to you.
What does an insurance company consider disabled?
The definition of a disability is very important in a disability insurance policy. The policy typically says that "due to an injury or sickness you are not able to work", and if you have a really good policy it will say "not only are you not able to do your own work, but in your specialty, if you have one". So if you're a litigating attorney and that's your specialty, getting in front of a courtroom, but you can't do that anymore, but you could become a trasactional lawyer, that policy might still say you're eligible for benefits even if you can't do what you used to do in your own occupation. So the typical scenario is, if you can't work and you're totally disabled, there are, every disability policy in America will pay you. But if it's a specialty problem, where you can't do your special occupation, then it's very important to read the fine print of a policy. That is why you also want to have an insurance agent that goes over these things with you so you're not buying a policy that's not going to pay you exactly. I have a doctor client right now who is a prominent physician and one of the policies he purchased before he met me did not insure him in his own occupation. The policy said, "We don't have to pay you because you're making good money at another occupation". So it's one of the most important parts of a disability policy, how they define disability.
