What Factors Determine Your Official Date of Disability?

Disability attorney Stephen Jessup discusses how difficult it can be for a claimant to determine their date of disability.

Determining the date of disability can be a complicated process. Obviously, if you’ve been in a car accident or if you’ve had a heart attack, it’s a little easier to determine that catastrophic event as to when it started. However, most people that do file for long-term disability, they have had a chronic condition that’s been ongoing, they may have been suffering with it for years, but they continue to try to work.

So determining when the date of disability is a coordinated effort between you as the insured, your doctor, and the medical records, and making sure that your records are really documenting your ongoing problems. Because if you file a claim four, five, six months later when that insurance company is reviewing that claim, if there isn’t good medical documentation around the time when where you’re stopping work, where your doctor is maybe advising you to cut back or to stop working at the point, the insurance company is going to challenge whether or not there was enough support to go on disability at that time.

Another thing, your policy may have a residual disability provision and that analysis as to date of the disability is something that’s going to be more complicated as financial circumstances are also going to have to weigh into that. So there’s no clear-cut, easy way to determine what date you became disabled short of a catastrophic event. If you’re considering filing for disability, it is advisable that you contact us and we can help try to guide you through that or help to provide a road map into how to best position your claim for filing for disability.