I’m not glowing with health. When am I considered disabled or ill?
Get Legal Help Today
Secured with SHA-256 Encryption
UPDATED: Jun 19, 2018
It’s all about you. We want to help you make the right legal decisions.
We strive to help you make confident insurance and legal decisions. Finding trusted and reliable insurance quotes and legal advice should be easy. This doesn’t influence our content. Our opinions are our own.
Editorial Guidelines: We are a free online resource for anyone interested in learning more about legal topics and insurance. Our goal is to be an objective, third-party resource for everything legal and insurance related. We update our site regularly, and all content is reviewed by experts.
It’s all laid out in the disability plan, in the definition of “disability“. The definition is critical to receiving an insurance check in the mailbox.
Not surprisingly, the definitions of disability vary greatly from policy to policy. Each company uses its own definitions. And the same company may use different definitions in an individual policy than in one of its group policies.
Some insurers require “total and permanent disability” before writing a check. Others provide, or make available, on an optional basis, a “partial disability” benefit paid while you are recuperating or returning to work part-time. A few provide coverage for “temporary” disabilities.
Common more in individual policies than employer-covered group policies are “any occupation” and “own occupation” coverage, both discussed in the preceding paragraph. Some policies will pay for the costs of education or occupational rehabilitation as you retrain. Some policies adjust benefits to take into account any Social Security payments; a few do not. Almost all policies limit or refuse coverage for disabilities caused by suicide, drug addiction, or alcoholism.