Disability Insurance: A Protection for Your Livelihood
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A common misconception about disability income insurance is that its sole purpose is to cover against catastrophic events resulting from accidents. In fact, illnesses like cancer, depression, and multiple sclerosis far more often impact your ability to work and support yourself and your family. Individual disability income insurance is designed to protect your income if you cannot work due to illness or injury.
The following are the highlights of a recent study done by a prominent disability insurance company:
- Nearly 40% of full-time workers, or 50 million Americans, have no disability insurance at all, and many more have inadequate income replacement coverage.1
- 3 in 10 households have experienced at least one disability leave in the past 10 years, and 55% say it had a major/devastating financial impact on their household.
- People with disability insurance were less likely to be negatively impacted (38% vs. 62% of those with no disability coverage).
- Among those with no disability insurance, 8 in 10 say they have not yet fully recovered financially.
Disability Income Protection:
A Must Have for Physicians, Nurses, Chiropractors, and Dentists!
We are closely familiar with health care professionals’ unique needs through long years of working with them. Our experience enables us to provide the best long-term disability insurance products from the industry’s highest rated companies. We only select policies with certain special features that are structured upon realistic analysis of medical careers and are built to help provide a higher degree of income security.
Enhanced True-Own Occupation Protection for Physicians, Nurses, Chiropractors and Dentists
- Provides more opportunities to qualify for benefits
- Offers the choice to work in another specialty or occupation – and still collect benefits
- Coverage offers a 10% preferred occupation discount
Optional benefits available
- Student loan debt payment protection
- Coverage for partial disabilities
- Lump sum benefit
- Ability to increase coverage as salary increases
A disability insurance policy has many built-in & optional features that play important roles in determining its quality, benefit levels and pricing. A disability policy’s three main features are:
1) The Monthly Benefit Amount: This is the dollar amount that the insured will receive each month, in case of disability.
2) The Elimination (Waiting) Period: This is the period that the insured has to wait before receiving benefits. A good quality disability policy would collectively consider different periods of disability, occurring in different times, towards satisfying the elimination period.
3) Disability Benefit Period: It’s the duration of time during which disability benefits are to be received. Disability benefit periods are typically 2 years, 5 Years and or to age 65.
In evaluating the quality of a disability insurance policy, the following four criteria should be examined:
• Renewability & the Non-Cancelable Provisions: Under these provisions, the insurance company not only guarantees to keep the policy features intact & unchanged, but it also guarantees to never increase the policy premiums & to never cancel it. In other words, the policy is automatically “renewed” every year without any changes in either its features or the premium.
• The “Own Occupation” Provision: Under the definition of “Own Occupation”, an insured is considered totally disabled if he is unable to perform the duties of his own occupation which can be narrowly defined as a particular specialty. In an “Own Occupation” policy, the insured typically continues receiving benefits even if he earns an income in a capacity other than his own specialty. As mentioned before, this feature is particularly popular among health care professionals.
• Residual/Partial Disability Benefit: Disability is not always total. There might be instances when an insured may only be able to perform the duties of his job on a part time basis due to partial disability. In such cases, the residual disability feature pays out benefits based on the percentage of the insured’s loss of income. So, as an example, If the insured loses 50% of his earned income due to disability, he will be able to receive 50% of the total disability benefit amount.