Consolidate Your Group Long-Term Disability Cover with an IDI Policy
Like most young doctors you also most likely work for a hospital, nursing home, or primary healthcare center for a wage. It is also likely that your employer has provided a group, long-term physicians, disability insurance cover for you and bears part of the cost. However, you must remember that a group cover has many limitations in terms of the benefits for a high-income individual like you. After all, doctors have one of the highest incomes among all working professionals with an average earning that is 4 times higher than the US national average.
You will obviously expect adequate income replacement at claim time if it ever comes. You also carry a huge debt in the form of a student loan that averages over $200,000 for a doctor in America. Repaying that kind of debt takes years, oftentimes more than a decade even for high-income-earning individuals like doctors. In the event of disability, adequate compensation should not just cover your student loan repayments but also pay for other bills. Group long-term disability insurance services cannot cover all that and the benefits may fall way short of meeting your needs.
Consolidate Your Group Long-Term Disability Cover with an IDI Policy
Don’t overlook the need for adequate coverage
Many young doctors are not even aware of the real dimensions of the risk of disability and are under the impression that their group’s long-term disability insurance is good enough to get them adequate coverage. If you are also under that impression, you couldn’t be further from the facts on record.
Your group policy won’t provide a replacement for even half of your after-tax income. Therefore, you will need individual disability insurance (IDI) policy that will cover 60-70% of your after-tax income. Unlike a group policy that lapses when you quit your job, an IDI policy always remains with you.
Getting optimum risk coverage from your insurance policy
The main objective of investing in a healthcare professional’s disability insurance is that you want to continue earning an income even when you are disabled and not able to work. The simple fact of life is, if you don’t work, you won’t earn any income.
For a young doctor, this kind of situation is way more complex because your student loan repayment takes up a major chunk of what you earn. If you fall ill or meet with an accident and are disabled for a few years, you will need a solid IDI policy like a dentist’s disability insurance policy.
Get the help of an insurance broker advisor
One of the reasons why a lot of people are reluctant to invest in the right healthcare professionals insurance policy is because it is not easy to select the right policy. No single insurance policy gives you everything that you need but some policies provide much more than the others in a specific category.
A long-term IDI policy is one such insurance product that offers a lot more than most others in the disability cover category. However, it also falls short in specific areas of coverage that you will need to stack or add up with other affordable options to your insurance cover. It is not easy to do that all by yourself and you will need the services of a reliable and experienced disability insurance broker to optimize your cover.
