What is your date of disability and why is that important? This is a common question among people. Knowing the date of your disability will prevent any complications and make the process a bit easier.
Make Yourself of Deadlines
The first reason is there are a bunch of deadlines that are embedded in your long-term disability insurance policy that you have to be aware of that are triggered by your date of disability. For example, you have to provide notice to your insurance company that you are now disabled, or your doctors have told you that you have reached some form of disability and you’re unable to work. And you’ve got to do that usually within 20 to 30 days of the date of your disability.
Elimination Period
Then you have what’s called an elimination period where you’re not entitled to any benefits. This is where it’s long-term disability – not short term disability. So you essentially have to wait for a period of time, that’s what we call the elimination period, to determine if your disability is a short term disability or a long-term disability. Most disability policies are 180 days, but some of them are as short as 90 days. So your elimination period will vary depending on the type of insurance policy that you have. But it’s important to know what your elimination date is.
The Elimination Period
The next period will be based on the ending of your elimination period. So you need to know when the date of disability is to know when your notice period is, and then to know when your elimination period begins and ends and then to know when your deadline for filing your claim is. After that, everything is based on other dates. For example, when your appeal is denied or when your claim is denied, you have 180 days to file your appeal. But that’s based on when the claim was denied, not based on when your date of disability is. There are a variety of reasons why you need to know what your date of disability is for those deadline periods.
How to Handle Insurance Company Objections
You also need to make yourself aware of an additional important part of this concept, which is the insurance company’s ultimate evaluation as to whether or not you are disabled. The insurance company is going to want to know why you could do your job on Tuesday, but you can no longer do your job on Wednesday. What happened between Tuesday and Wednesday that now means that you can’t do your job, your regular occupation? And you have to be able to support that with medical evidence and have a doctor’s opinion that says the condition has progressed to such a point that on this day, this person can no longer work. That’s your date of disability.
Looking back the insurance company’s going to say, “Well, you were evaluated on Monday and you were evaluated on Thursday and the evaluation is the same. Why on Wednesday did your doctor say that you can no longer work?” You need to be able to flush that out for the insurance company, you’ve got to provide these answers and look forward to what the objections are going to be for your disability. Next, think about how you handle those objections by answering them proactively.
So there are two very big reasons why your date of disability is important. One, because you have certain deadlines that are based on your date of disability. Two — because the insurance company is going to pay particular attention to that time period to really determine if the medical evidence and the other evidence and make them say, “Yes, you are disabled.” Or “No, you are not disabled.” I hope this information has been helpful to you. If it has been helpful, please do me a favor, share it with your friends and family, share it on social media or via email so that other people can be helped by this content. If you have any questions about your date of disability or anything that we’ve talked about in this blog post, please feel free to give us a call or send us an email, we’d love to help you.
