As a working professional you depend on your ability to work in order to earn a livelihood. This is true in the early part of your career when you are in your early 20s and have just joined a job. Understandably, you have no savings to speak of at this stage because you have never worked to earn a serious income prior to this. If you are a healthcare professional, you will also be carrying the huge debt of your student loan, which you would like to repay as soon as possible. In this situation, can you afford to lose work days much less fall sick or get hurt and become disabled for a few years? Unfortunately, such an eventuality is a real possibility and the best way to deal with it is not to turn away from it and ignore it but be prepared to tackle it if and when it affects you. Disability insurance helps you do that effectively.
What makes insurance against disability so important?
To start with, any working professional and not just doctors must have income protection in the event of disability. The younger you are, the more you need such protection because at a young age your financial independence is at the lowest level. You need a doctors disability insurance to provide you that protection.
The average student loan that a doctor in the United States has to repay is $250,000. This easily takes more than a decade to repay even with the higher income of doctors. On the other hand studies show that one in every four millennial in the country could suffer some disability in his/her lifetime. In the face of such risks, why would you not take a physicians disability insurance?
Choosing the right insurance policy
Buying any kind of insurance is not as easy as investing in a mutual fund where you don’t have to weigh the benefits like you do in case of insurance, more so a healthcare professionals insurance policy. There are different types of policies for different groups of individuals that need to be blended to get optimum benefits.
What you should ideally look for is adequate replacement of your income but by no means 100% or even 90% replacement. You could get close to 80% in a short term policy but that is not possible in a long term dentists disability insurance or similar other policies made for doctors. It is recommended that you consult an insurance advisor for guidance in this matter.
Finding the balance between an individual and a group policy
For high income professionals like doctors, the best healthcare professionals disability insurance policy is the individual long term policy. In the early years of your career, it fits your coverage requirement perfectly, but down the years, as your income scales 6-7 figures, there will be a coverage gap. Ideally, you would like 60-70% of your after tax income to be covered by the policy.
In order to close the coverage gap in an individual long term policy it is advisable to stack your coverage against disability with an additional layer of group long term insurance. This is not really easy because it requires knowledge about the industry and products that are available. However, if you hire the services of a reliable and experienced disability insurance broker, s/he will ensure that your coverage gap is narrowed or even eliminated, giving you optimum protection.
