Cigna Long Term Disability

Terry Cochran

There is a very disturbing trend taking place in Michigan where people approved for long-term disability claim on the six-month blue later, their benefits canceled by the insurance company. You can imagine the havoc caused in the life of that person.

The reason is that the Employee Retirement and Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) has been rigged by the Congress and rigged by the courts to be strongly biased against in favor of the insurance company LTD duration of liabilities (ILD) to an individual.

Insurance companies sell group policies that provide some courts have found little or no coverage. Congress approved ERISA to "protect" employees' pensions, but in doing so, unwittingly, has given the inability of insurance companies a free pass to play the game on a ground which is not level.

This practice has been challenged by a lawsuit against insurance giant UnumProvident (Unum) accusing the insurance company designed a system illegally deny or terminate the long-term disability insurance to thousands of people in violation of the ERISA. The costs of litigation that Unum reduce costs by eliminating claims by:

• offer financial incentives to doctors to endorse already taken internal business decisions
• allowing more senior doctors internally to change the written reports of other "non-cooperative in-house doctors" to justify a claim denial or termination
• stop payments to policyholders without any explanation given for the termination

In the newer institutions Unum agreed to return some 200,000 rejected disability claims. The company faces a potential fine of $ 145 million in Maine alone. And this is just an insurance company, there are others engaged in similar deceptive practices.

The fact that insurance companies are unnecessarily terminating previously approved LTD claim is an attack done more to steal well-intentioned, honest citizens of the benefits they have coming. I find it absolutely horrible. It is bad enough that insurance companies, without cause, will be systematically denied disability insurance submitted during the first and force the plaintiffs to appeal or resubmit the claims. This is a trick long LTD insurance companies, and it is false!

Disabled workers how are denied benefits must appeal not once but twice to the insurance company, a process that takes at least six months and requires patients to track all medical records to present all documents and that they can later use in a trial. After a second denial, the insurer may refer a case for an "independent" medical examination by a physician chosen by the insurance company.

ERISA law, supplemented by the decisions of the Federal Court allows workers to deny benefits to request a bench trial limited - a simple examination of the administrative record, no new evidence, no witnesses, no jury. But federal law only allows the plaintiff to sue for benefits of origin. There is no payment of damages or pain and suffering.

A study of 576 lawsuits filed in federal court against seven major insurers Disability (MetLife, Unum, Prudential Financial Inc., CIGNA Corporation, Standard Insurance Co. and Aetna Inc.) found that insurance companies:

• Regularly deny or terminate benefits to individuals, even after having determined to be disabled by the federal government and approved payments for Social Security Disability.
• Physicians lease that systematically reject the advice of doctors, without ever seeing patients.
• Offer employees incentives to deny claims and cancel, typing performance evaluations for the achievement of savings targets.
• Force applicants to wait two years and eight months on the average shape of t.