By Tom Strangstalien, Insurance Advisor
May is Disability Insurance Awareness Month. This is the perfect time to evaluate your disability protection, determining if you’re adequately covered and address any potential holes or gaps in your coverage. A common theme I hear when talking with our members is, “I have disability insurance coverage as part of my employee benefits, so do I really need personal disability protection?” For physicians and medical professionals, the answer is almost always yes!
Typical limitations of group coverage
First, there is a cap on the amount of benefits that will be paid out for a claim. If the maximum benefit amount is $10,000 per month and as a physician you’re earning $300,000 per year, you’re not even covering half of your income. Are you willing to roll the dice for a potentially devasting and dramatic lifestyle change?
Second, group disability coverage contains “offset provisions.” This means that if you are drawing payments from other sources upon incurring a disability, the benefits paid by the group policy will be reduced pro-rata. These sources could include things like social security, liability settlements, workers compensation payments, employer provided retirement plan replacement benefits and other accident or short-term disability plans. A properly designed personal disability plan will not contain such provisions.
Next, group disability plans are not portable. In other words, if you change your place of employment or go into practice on your own or as an independent contractor, you will lose the disability protection. If you have incurred some health issues, coverage then can be very expensive or not available to you at all. This is why it’s so important to get a personal disability plan in place as early in life as possible.
Benefits of personal disability insurance
With a personal disability insurance plan, there are many optional benefits available to you. It’s not a one size fits all plan like a group plan tends to be. You can elect additional coverages such as:
- student loan payment coverage
- inflation protection
- catastrophic coverage
- partial and residual disability coverage levels
- future increase benefits (you can increase the amount of benefits as your income increases with no additional medical underwriting)
What I want you to take away from this article during Disability Awareness Month is this: take a few minutes and review your current disability protection. If you do not yet have a personal disability plan, get one as soon as possible. Don’t roll the dice with your biggest asset – your ability to earn a substantial income! As the independent insurance agency of the Wisconsin Medical Society, we can shop all of the major insurers, review your current group plan and design a plan that will fully protect you and your family for your lifetime.
As your financial partner, your WisMed Assure team is here to take care of your personal financial security so that you can take the best possible care of yourself, your family and your patients.
For additional information regarding disability insurance, contact WisMed Assure at insurance@wismedassure.org, complete this online form or call 608.442.3810.