You’ll find plenty of websites claiming that 1 in 5 life insurance claims is denied, or that some insurers deny half their claims. Many of those figures come from health insurance data, which has nothing to do with life insurance. Below are the figures that do come from primary life insurance sources:
If you get health and retirement benefits through work, ERISA is supposed to protect your rights regarding these programs. If you are considering making a claim to access any of the benefits available to you–such as disability, health insurance, or life insurance–you will need to follow specific procedures. Similarly, if your claim is denied, you…
Unfortunately, one of the most common reasons insurance companies refuse to pay a life insurance claim is because the insured smoked, but did not disclose their past or current smoking habit on their initial life insurance application and medical questionnaire.
Alcohol consumption can actually lead to a denied life insurance claim—even if your death wasn’t directly caused by it.
Yes, you can appeal a life insurance claim denial. How you do it depends on where the policy came from. If the coverage came through an employer, it’s probably governed by ERISA, a federal law with strict appeal rules that can decide the outcome of the case. If it’s an individual policy you or the…
Sometimes the way a loved one dies exacerbates the grief of friends and family members. Autoerotic asphyxiation can be one of those causes of death, but life insurance beneficiaries often have more problems to deal with than their embarrassment or shame when an insured dies that way.
Most life insurance claims are paid. When one isn’t, the insurer will point to a reason, and the reason sounds final in a denial letter. In my experience, many of them aren’t. Some denials are correct. Others rely on an exclusion that doesn’t fit the facts, an application error that had nothing to do with…
Life insurance generally covers a death from COVID-19. Standard life insurance policies don’t have a pandemic exclusion, so an insurer can’t deny a claim simply because the insured died of COVID-19. When these claims are denied, the denial usually rests on something else: the application, the contestability period, a lapse, or, for accidental death coverage,…
Sound familiar? It happens more often than one would think. If this happens to you or someone you love, don’t feel powerless – there is something you can do about it.
