Today I want to talk about one of the nastier tactics that insurance companies can use to harm your workers disability claim and deny your benefits. It’s called separating impairments.
What does that mean? Well, many times if you’re applying for disability benefits, you have a variety of things wrong with you. Maybe you suffer from severe migraines and debilitating back pain or depression and anxiety. Whatever the specific impairments you have, their combined effect on you makes you eligible for disability.
But insurance companies often have a policy of separating out each of your individual problems and sending each one out to a different disability specialist – a doctor who specializes in that specific impairment. Their argument is that it’s better to have people who are experts in particular areas looking at those problems rather than asking a doctor to make a judgment about something when it isn’t his or her specialty.
Separating Impairments Hides the Big Picture
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The problem with separating your impairments in this way is that, quite often, the whole range of things that you have wrong with you make a much larger impact together than they do individually. But disability specialists who only see a single impairment are asked to judge your need for disability based on that one problem.
For example, let’s say you have migraines. Some people have incredibly serious migraines that are so bad that their daily life is hard to live and the idea of working through the pain is just not feasible. For these people, getting disability insurance benefits based on their migraines alone should be no problem. However, there is another group where the migraines are bad and they impact the sufferer’s lives now and again, but it’s a workable situation. For the second group, a doctor only looking at the migraines probably wouldn’t recommend disability.
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But now let’s say that migraines aren’t your only problem. You also have back pain that puts you in bed for days on end. And maybe you even suffer from a third issue as well. Together, these problems make it impossible for you to hold down a steady job. But because each doctor only sees one impairment, they say that that the single impairment isn’t enough to justify disability, and you end up with a bunch of expert opinions saying you shouldn’t receive benefits but who haven’t even seen the totality of what you actually face.
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This is where an experienced disability attorney will be able to step in and prove the totality of your disability. One who can build a case on the 360 degree view of your daily struggle with your issues and prove to the insurance company that your impairments need to be taken as a whole and not examined separately. With a good attorney on your side, you have a much higher chance of your winning the benefits that you deserve. Our law firm has been fighting for disability benefits for over twenty years and we can help you too.
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