When you join service as a doctor with any healthcare services institution like a hospital or primary healthcare facility you invariably get a complimentary group long-term or short-term policy to cover against the risk of disability. This itself underlines the importance of getting insurance cover against disability which is as real as any other health risk that people face. The only problem is that most folks aren’t able to understand the scale of damage that disability can do. Those who do understand it well enough would ask you to invest in an individual disability insurance (IDI) policy before anything else.
There are good reasons for that, especially when you consider the fact that one in every four millennials in the United States is going to face some or other kind of disability in his/her lifetime. Young doctors carry the burden of student loan repayment as they begin their careers with a debt averaging $200,000, which takes them at least a decade to repay. It is the young doctors more than anybody else who need long term disability insurance. This is extremely important because the average duration of disability in the country is 31 months. If you aren’t able to earn an income due to disability for that long, you could end up in a financial crisis.
Consolidate your IDI cover with a group long term policy
While an IDI policy is what every working individual should invariably have, a group long-term doctors disability insurance policy can consolidate your overall insurance cover. In the early stages of your career, your IDI policy can easily provide adequate cover of up to 60-70% of your after-tax income.
However, as you grow in the profession, and your income reaches levels that experienced and established doctors, in general, are known to earn, an IDI policy on its own cannot provide adequate cover. That’s because insurance carriers apply a ceiling on the amount of benefit they will offer for any policy.
A group long term policy cannot be your main policy
This brings up the question of whether an IDI policy is good enough to provide adequate cover to you. Here, you need to realize that it is only a long-term IDI policy that will cover you for the entire duration of your disability and provide way more benefits than any other policy.
As already explained, an individual healthcare professionals disability insurance policy will provide adequate benefits up to a point in your career. Thereafter, as you head towards financial independence, your need for cover against disability decreases. However, till the time you are financially independent you need to consolidate your IDI policy with a group insurance policy.
Get the services of a professional insurance advisor
As a busy doctor, you don’t have much time to spare for reading up a whole lot of insurance fine print to know which carrier offers the most optimum cover. Only an industry professional who deals with such matters day in and out would be able to do that effectively.
Therefore, it is much better if you look for the services of an insurance adviser who represents an insurance carrier like MGIS, which specializes in providing disability cover to doctors. All kinds of professionals have specific requirements and doctors are no exception to this rule. Please visit www.mgis.com for more information.
