Why Insurance Bad Faith Is More Likely To Happen To Professionals

When you buy individual disability insurance, you expect your insurance company will act in good faith if you need to file a claim. However, it's very common for bad faith - also known as an insurance company's attempt to delay or deny payment on a legitimate claim - to occur, especially when the claimant is a highly skilled professional. Here are three reasons why.

Insurance companies make assumptions about "desk jobs."

By definition, desk jobs - also known as sedentary work - are positions in which you sit for at least two-thirds of the day. Although sedentary jobs don't require much physical exertion, they also involve non-exertional activities, which include:

• Using fingers and hands to manipulate, reach, or handle objects
• Seeing, speaking or hearing
• Paying attention or concentrating
• Understanding or remembering detailed instructions

Unfortunately, insurance companies may deliberately ignore your cognitive and non-exertional job requirements in evaluating your occupation. It is extremely important to arm your treating doctors with all the pertinent information needed to answer the carrier's questions about your occupational demands - both physical and mental.

Professionals are less likely to fight a wrongful denial.

This is especially true when you're already beaten down by a disabling illness or injury and trying to fathom how to defeat a billion-dollar insurance company. If you have a healthy savings account, you may weigh the costs and benefits of fighting a wrongful denial and decide it's not worth the stress and emotional upheaval. After all, you may not become financially destitute if the insurance benefits are wrongfully denied. Insurance companies count on a certain percentage of people just giving up; they're automatic "wins" for the carrier.

Professionals get less-than-perfect advice from well-intentioned people.

When you are faced with decisions about their insurance claim, it may not occur to you to consult an insurance bad faith attorney. Instead, you may ask your tax preparer, accountant, financial advisor, or family lawyer. Although these people mean well, they are generally not as familiar with the subtleties in the application process, policy restrictions, exclusions and limitations, and common claims delay and denial strategies. Without the help of an insurance bad faith attorney, you may make fatal claim mistakes that ensure a denial of benefits.

Do you have questions about your individual disability insurance claim? Contact a top-rated bad faith disability insurance attorney for a free consultation.

This post originally appeared on the DarrasLiving blog.