In this video Marc Whitehead, Board Certified Disability Attorney, explains how Long Term Disability Insurance Companies deny benefits by separating impairments.
One of the nastier tactics that insurance companies can use to harm your workers disability claim and deny your benefits is: Separating Impairments.
What does this mean? Many times when applying for disability benefits you have a variety of things that are wrong with you, like depression and anxiety. Whatever the specific impairments you have their combined effects on you could make 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. Often times a doctor who specializes in that specific impairment. Their argument is that it is better to have people who are experts in particular areas looking at these problems, rather then asking a doctor to make a judgment about something that isn’t in his or her specialty.
The problem with separating your impairments this way is that, quite often, the whole range of things that you have wrong with you make a much larger impact together then they do individually. Disability specialists who only see a single impairment are asked to judge your need for disability based on that one problem. In short, Separated impairments hides the big picture.
For example: A Claimant has migraines. Some people have such severe migraines that are so bad that their daily life is hard live and the idea of working through the pain is just not feasible. For these people, getting disability payments based on their migraines alone should be no problem. However, there is another group where migraines are bad and they impact the sufferers lives every now and again but it is a workable situation. For the second group a doctor only looking at the migraines probably wouldn’t recommend disability. But, what happens if your 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 pain 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 may say that this single impairment isn’t enough to justify disability.
In this example you end up with a bunch of experts opinions saying you shouldn’t receive benefits but who haven’t even seen the totality of what you actually face.
This is where an experienced Disability Attorney will help to step in an 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 your insurance company that your impairment needs to be taken as a whole and not examined separately. With a good Attorney on your side you have a much higher chance of winning the benefits you deserve.
