How Long Does It Take to Get Benefits? – Part 1
You’ve made the difficult decision to give up practicing medicine or dentistry and file a disability claim. You’re not working and you need to collect the disability benefits you’ve likely paid years of high premiums for. So how long will you have to wait until your first benefit check arrives?
Unfortunately, the answer is not clear cut—it depends on the terms of your disability insurance policy, your insurance company, the assigned benefits analyst, and the complexity of your disability claim, among other things.
Filing a Claim
Your disability insurance policy should outline the requirements for filing a disability claim. Typically, you must give notice of your disability claim to your insurer within a certain time frame. If you miss this important deadline, the insurance company will typically claim that you have prejudiced its ability to investigate your claim, and use this as an excuse to delay making a decision on your disability claim. Significantly, if you don’t provide timely notice, it can also foreclose your ability to collect disability benefits (depending on the circumstances, and the reason for the delay).
Once you file your disability claim with your insurer, they will then send disability claim forms to be completed by you and your physician. Your policy should include a deadline for when your insurer must provide you with these forms (e.g. 15 days). If they don’t provide you with forms within this time frame, most disability insurance policies allow you to submit a written statement documenting your proof of loss, in lieu of the forms. Again, there is a deadline to return these forms and failing to do so gives your disability insurer an excuse to prolong the decision-making process.
Elimination and Accumulation Periods
Your disability insurance policy will also contain details about your elimination period. This is the period of time that must pass between your disability date and eligibility for payment on a disability claim. Generally, you must be disabled (as defined in your policy) and not working in your occupation during this time period.
Depending on the terms of your disability insurance policy, this period does not necessarily have to be consecutive, but it does need to occur within the accumulation period also set out in your policy (for example, your policy might require a 90 day elimination period that must be met within a 7 month accumulation period). You will not be eligible for payment until the elimination period has been fulfilled. Typically, disability insurers won’t provide you with a claim decision until after this date has passed.
It is important to be aware of your elimination period, so that you can plan accordingly (and are not expecting a benefit payment to arrive right way when you are budgeting to meet living expenses, or debts like student loans). Also, it’s important to keep in mind that receiving a benefit payment immediately following the elimination period is the ideal scenario. In many disability claims, it takes much longer for a benefit to be issued. In our next post, we will address some of the most common reasons disability benefit payments are delayed.
