Disability Claims
Disability insurers deny at the start and terminate later. These cover the definitions that decide a claim, the tactics used to build a denial, and where the law comes from.
First: where did your coverage come from?
If this coverage came through an employer, federal law may govern it — which changes your appeal rights, imposes deadlines that are strict, and can displace the state remedies described here. Establish that before deciding how to fight a denial.
Where Your Disability Policy Came From Decides How the Fight Works
Two people can be denied for the same reason, on the same medical facts, and have entirely different options — because one bought the policy and the other got it at work.
Read more →The Definition That Decides Your Claim
Disability policies do not ask whether you are unwell. They ask whether you meet a definition, and which definition applies is usually the most consequential thing in the document.
Read more →Conditions That Do Not Show on a Scan
Chronic pain, fatigue conditions, and mental health claims face a particular obstacle: insurers ask for objective evidence of conditions that are diagnosed largely through symptoms and clinical judgment.
Read more →Being Watched While Your Claim Is Reviewed
Surveillance is routine in disability claims, and it is legal. What makes it effective is not that claimants are dishonest but that a few minutes of footage can be presented as though it described every day.
Read more →When Your Disability Payments Stop
Disability payments stopping after months or years of being paid is unsettling in a way an initial denial is not. Nothing about your condition changed, and yet the money stopped.
Read more →When Your Long-Term Disability Claim Is Denied
An initial long-term disability denial is a different problem from having benefits stopped after they have been paid for a while, and it needs to be approached differently. Before anything else, one question decides how the whole thing works: where your policy came from.
Read more →Looking for the law in your state?
These describe how each denial works, which is much the same everywhere. What you can do about one is not — choose the state where your policy was issued.