There’s absolutely nothing in your policy that gives your insurance company the right to hire a private investigator to watch you and record your daily activities, but that hasn’t stopped most of them from doing it more and more in recent years.
The idea is that by following beneficiaries around and watching them closely, they’ll catch people in the act of doing something they shouldn’t be able to do based on their condition and have a valid reason to deny your claim or stop payments.
Supposedly, it’s a way to cut down on fraud, but all too often it results in the insurance companies or the investigators they hire using shady practices to make it look like claimants are behaving badly when the truth is something completely different.
So, how do you fight back against these tactics and make sure you get the long term disability benefits you need?
What to Do When Surveillance Costs You Benefits
The way that this surveillance works in disability insurance denials is that insurance companies will send video recordings and the investigator’s written report to the independent medical examiner treating you. They want to bias the doctor against you and get him to ask leading questions and look for specific things, so it’s important that you know how to deal with this kind of evidence.
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Watch the footage. You should be allowed to look at the footage yourself so that you can see how you’re being represented and explain anything that appears to hurt your claim. Often, things will be taken out of context and may even be edited to make you look worse, so you need to know what you’re dealing with.
Read the reports. Investigators are supposed to simply report the facts, but quite frequently their reports are riddled with editorializing comments designed to turn the doctor against you. It’s not even out of the question for investigators to turn in reports that barely seem to match the actual video footage.
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Learn what the claims person used. Far too often, the claims person deciding your fate doesn’t even bother to watch the actual video footage because that takes up too much time. Instead, they simply read investigators’ reports. But as I mentioned above, quite often the reports are incredibly editorialized and exaggerate what’s in the videos. A good disability attorney will then use this to argue that they didn’t consider all the evidence when denying your claim.
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Until disability laws are changed to prevent spying, this is the only recourse claimants really have. Check out our free disability eBook to learn more about different policies and how you can fight for the benefits that you need and check back weekly for more blogs explaining your rights!
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