Life, Health & Disability Insurance Claims

You paid the premiums for years so that your family would be covered on the worst day of their lives. Then the claim lands on an adjuster's desk.

Life Insurance Claims

People buy life insurance for one reason: so that the family they leave behind is not handed a financial crisis on top of a funeral. A death benefit ought to be the simplest claim there is. A policy, a death certificate, a payment.

It often is not. Exactly as in a homeowner's or business claim, carriers look for reasons to delay the benefit or to refuse it outright. Five come up again and again:

• Unpaid premiums. The insurer asserts the policy had lapsed before the death.
• Misrepresentation. The insurer says an answer on the original application was false or incomplete.
• Drug or alcohol use. The insurer claims intoxication puts the death outside coverage.
• Cause-of-death exclusion. The insurer points to a particular cause the policy excludes.
• Illness exclusion. The insurer says an excluded illness bars the claim.

If you have just lost someone, the last thing you should be doing is arguing with a claims department about the wording of a form signed years ago.

Disability Insurance Claims

Disability insurance covers you when an injury or illness stops you working. It is there to protect your income, your family and everything you have built, for as long as you cannot earn.

Insurers are especially skeptical of disability claims, even though they set the premium and issued the policy themselves. Claims are deliberately delayed, or denied outright in the hope that you will accept the company's position and go away. A denial letter is your insurer's opinion. It is not the last word.

Health Insurance Claims

Denied and delayed health claims are held to the same standard. Whatever the label on the policy, your insurer owes you a duty of good faith and fair dealing: investigate the claim properly, apply the policy honestly, and decide within a reasonable time. When it will not, we take that claim on the same way we take on any other.

What You Can Recover

Two things. First, the benefits you are owed under the contract you paid for. Second, where the insurer's handling of the claim was unreasonable, extra-contractual damages for bad faith, which can go beyond what the policy itself would have paid.

How We Help

Doug consults personally with every client and builds a case plan around that client's situation rather than a template. He has spent 25 years handling insurance claims for Arizona families, all of it on the policyholder's side, and he knows what a carrier does next long before it does it.

The first consultation is free and no-hassle, and we work on a contingency basis. If we do not recover anything for you, you do not owe us a fee. Call (602) 528-4700 or send us a message and tell us what the insurer has said so far.