Protect your career with Disabled Insurance
Have you suffered from a stroke, a heart attack or a car accident? What about complications with your pregnancy? Chances are that while your health coverage is taking care of the bills, you aren’t spending too much time at work, and therefore you have a lot of income that’s just not coming in.
It is extremely important to get disability insurance. Even if you can’t show up to your job the coverage will pay you while you’re still recovering. It is also important to understand that state disabilty insurance is granted to you and your family should suffer from an unexpected calamity or an ongoing and debilitating illness.
Indeed, when considering whether or not to invest in disability income insurance, it is important to remember that – if you are like most people, both old and young – income is your primary way to survive. Without it, you have relatively far fewer assets to pull from in the event of illness, injury or any form of catastrophe that keeps you away from work.
Unfortunately, many people choose not to get disability insurance for lost income coverage. This is due to the fact that they apparently don’t see how likely it really is to occur. According to a recent study, however, over a third of workers between the ages of 30 and 40 will need to take more than three months off work due to a disabling illness or condition.
So how are you going to protect yourself?
Before beginning a new job, check to see if your employer offers group disability insurance that would cover you in the event of a disabling accident. This desirable component of any employees’ package would include the added benefit of providing coverage whether or not the disabling accident occurred at work or if the injury happened at some other time, off the clock.
Yet it is important to determine the exact nature of the insurance plan that you are being offered. That’s because while you may take the job anyway, the plan might fall short of what your needs are, and you may want to supplement it with additional coverage of your own.
So, to break it down, there are essentially two types of coverage, short term disability insurance, and long term disability insurance. The short term plan is set up to pay a significant percentage of your income for as long as half a year. It kicks in right when the sick pay ends, and is designed particularly for disabling conditions which are determined to be temporary.
Now, long term disability insurance is quite different. It is actually intended to cover people who are unfortunate enough to have received an injury that disables them for life – or at least a very long time. In such cases, a really good long term plan for a disabled worker will give them payments until retirement age. Other plans don’t last as long, yet still – by nature – continue for a good number of years. Typically the payment distributions are less than those of short term insurance, and come out at just under a third of the person’s income.
Among employers, the ideal benefits package will include some form of both – and worthwhile employers generally stick to this model. When push comes to shove, however, it is important to find out what, exactly, your state’s disability law requirement is. That’s because in many states short term disability insurance is actually a requirement. If you feel that your employer may have violated state law by not providing short term disability insurance, then it is important to contact a disability lawyer and look into filing a lawsuit in order to claim what is rightly yours.
Although you should do the research on your own, here is a quick reference to get an idea of what some states are supposed to offer in terms of short term disability insurance. California disability insurance law, for instance, requires that employers offer a full year of short term insurance, while other states do it differently. New Jersey and New York state disability insurance – as well as Rhode Island and Hawaii – should require employers to pay disability coverage of half a year.
More and more, however, employers are setting up disability insurance schemes that operate so that the company itself does not have to front the whole cost of coverage. This means that you may be going in on half – or even all – of the disability insurance cost.
Yet no matter what the particular arrangement ends up being, it is extremely important to make sure that you are covered by short term disability insurance, especially when it is the law. It is also highly advisable to acquire long term disability insurance in order to better protect yourself. | 
