First things first, why should you purchase long term disability insurance? The simple answer would be so that in case you become disabled as a result of an injury or illness and can no longer work, you would still be able to support your living expenses.

A long term disability insurance policy pays you a monthly amount in case your disability prevents you from working and therefore earning an income.

In addition to supporting your living expenses, long term disability insurance will also help safeguard your personal financial health.

By providing you with monetary benefits, long term disability insurance gives you the income you need in order to pay for your monthly bills, mortgage payments, groceries, and whatever expenses you may have.

Long term disability insurance policies differ from one company to another. Often, you get the policy benefits that you paid for. In order to choose the best policy suitable to your needs, you need to review the following components of a long term disability insurance:

Benefit Amount

This is the amount of monetary benefit that you receive from your insurance company in case you become disabled. Some long term disability insurance policies are based on your salary, paying you a portion thereof every month.

Out of the several federal programs that provide assistance to people with disabilities the largest is the Social Security and Supplemental Security Income of the SSA (Social Security Administration). Divided into two, they are composed of the following:

• Social Security Disability Insurance
• Supplemental Security Income

The two programs are different and give different benefits to persons with disabilities. However, both are administered by the Social Security Administration.

Only individuals who have disabilities that come under the purview of the disability law may qualify for the benefits specified under either program.

For purposes of this article, the focus would be on the Social Security Disability Insurance program, which pays benefits to you and certain members of your family if you are “insured.”

Now, what does it mean being “insured?” Before we answer that question, let us first define what the Social Security Administration considers as “disability.”

What is Social Security’s Definition of “Disability?”

Before going into an enumeration as to what benefits you may be entitled under the Social Security Disability Insurance, it is important that you first know what Social Security means by “disabled.”

This is because the Social Security Administration defines “disability” differently from other programs.

One out of seven people will experience disability lasting five years or longer before reaching the age of sixty five. In fact, throughout the working phase of a person’s life, from age twenty-two to sixty-five, a temporary disability is much more likely to happen than death.

However, life insurance is more extensively purchased than disability insurance, which covers specified percentage of an employee’s regular monthly pay.

For self employed individuals, disability insurance may even be more important than for an average employee. Self employed people do not have the built-in luxury of paid sick leave to tide them over if they suffer an injury or are unable to work.

Without proper self employed disability insurance, a disability that lasted several years could result to serious economic difficulties.

Thus, self employed persons should take a serious glance at their financial situation and decide whether savings are sufficient enough to carry them through an extended disability.

If not, then the best way to prepare, other than ample funds in savings, is to purchase self employed disability insurance.

Self employed disability insurance could be the only thing that would prevent one from losing their home, business, and others, if unable to work for an extended duration of time due to ill or injury.

Did you know that one out of seven Americans may get into an accident or develop an illness that would prevent them from working or performing their occupation?

There is no telling whether you will be one of the lucky ones who will never have to worry about income stoppage on a temporary or permanent basis, or be just another number in the statistics.

In any case, purchasing an individual disability insurance policy might just be what you need to give yourself some peace of mind.

What is Individual Disability Insurance?

Basically, an individual disability insurance policy is one that allows you to still earn a portion of your gross income should a sickness or illness prevents you from working.

It is an insurance product that will support you for the period of time during which you are disabled and unable to work or perform what is required of you in your own occupation, or any occupation for that matter.

What does Individual Disability Insurance Cover?

The benefits you receive from your individual disability insurance will cover any living expenses you may have, including your monthly bills, mortgage and car payments, groceries, and other daily expenses.

You can’t predict when accidents might happen or when you may develop a sickness or an illness that may lead to your being unable to work for two or three months.

If something like this happens, do you have enough savings to cover your living expenses while you are out of work during your period of recovery? If not, then your answer is short term disability insurance.

According to research conducted by the American Council of Life Insurers, nearly one third of all Americans between the ages of 35 and 65 will suffer a serious disability.

This disability could either be short term or long term. Disability insurance therefore should form an essential part of your financial plan.

What is Short Term Disability Insurance?

Short term disability insurance is an insurance product that pays a percentage of your salary if you become temporarily disabled due to sickness or injury.

In order to qualify for this type of insurance, your sickness or injury must lead to a disability that lead to your being unable to work for a temporary period. Injury here does not include on the job injuries since these are covered by workers’ compensation insurance.

When children have a learning disability, the first to notice is usually the parents. A learning disability is a neurological disorder. In layman’s terms, that means the brain of a person with a learning disability is differently “wired” from that of a person without such disability.

Thus, a child with a learning disability could be as smart, or even smarter than his or her peers. The only difference is that the child may have difficulty in performing certain activities, such as reading, writing, spelling, reasoning, recalling and/or organizing information, if left to figure things out by himself or if taught in conventional methods.

If your child has a learning disability, the first thing you need to consider is the fact that it can never be cured or fixed. Such disability is a lifelong issue. But a child with a learning disability can go on and become successful in school as well as life, if given the right support and the right intervention.

What are the common forms of learning disability?

There are many types of learning disabilities affecting children and even adults. In fact, according to the National Institutes of Health, a total of 15% of the US population is suffering from a form of learning disability. That is equivalent to one in seven Americans.

The law does not legislate morality in a person. There is no statute that exists mandating an employer to be courteous or decent, for a person is free to do what he pleases and how he pleases it.

Liberty, this “greatest of all rights,” is constitutionally guaranteed and Congress has no more right to restrain it than it has right to pass a law that necessarily curtails it.

In fact, the only time that a law can effectively limit one’s liberty is if that liberty trespasses on another’s liberty and then the State would have to intervene.

Hence, while there are no laws that require courtesy in an employer, there are, however, laws that forbid certain kinds of mistreatment under certain circumstances.

One such circumstance is one that results in a hostile work environment. This is contemplated under most antidiscrimination laws, such as the hostile work environment disability provision.

What does “hostile work environment disability” mean?

The law does not explicitly discuss harassment, whether speech or non-speech. What the law does is simply to bar hostile work environment disability in the “terms, conditions, or privileges of employment.”

Federal disability programs which are typically limited to people under the age of sixty-five, provide services such as health care coverage, cash support, and direct supportive services to qualified people with disabilities.

Federal disability programs serve people of all ages but the majority of disability programs tend to be targeted either on children or on adults in their working areas, normally defined as from eighteen to sixty-four years of age, for the reason that the risk of having a disability increases with age.

A lot of programs serving the working-age population include fraction of people in their later working years fifty to sixty-four.

Billions of dollars are used up on Federal disability programs for people with disabilities. In 1989, $85 or eight percent of all Federal expenditures was spent on disability programs aimed primarily on people under the age of sixty-five.

Nine major Federal disability programs which consists of sizable percentage of people aged fifty to sixty-four are:

Social Security Disability Insurance

This Federal disability program is the primary social insurance program which protects workers from loss of income for causes of disability.

About three in one thousand babies are born with a hearing disability or otherwise known as hearing impairment. This disability is one of the most common birth defects.

A hearing disability can also develop later in life, and can happen because the person was born with ear parts that did not form correctly and do not function well, while other causes can be due to a later injury or illness that includes middle ear fluid, serious infections, head injury, listening to very loud music especially through headphones, and repeated exposure to loud sounds such as machineries.

Different types of Hearing Disability

A hearing disability is a decrease in the ability to recognize sound and can affect any creature that hears. There are some different types of hearing disability which include:

Conductive Hearing Disability

This happens when there is a problem with a part of the outer or middle ear. Nearly all children with conductive hearing disability have mild hearing loss and is usually temporary and in most cases be medically treated.

Sensory Hearing Disability

It cans Occurs when the cochlea is not functioning properly because of damaged or destroyed tiny hair cells.

Fibromyalgia disability has caused skepticism in the eyes of the Social Security Administration. Although many of those with this condition file for disability benefits, only few cases successfully receive benefits.

There could be many reasons to back up for this problem. For one, there is no listing in the Social Security’s Listing of Impairments Manual, a manual that contains the lists of illnesses acceptable for disability, for fibromyalgia disability.

But most importantly, there is no denying that this does not change the fact that this illness does hinder people from being able to work.

Also, the symptoms and causes of fibromyalgia differ from one person to the other. This is why it is hard to determine if the level of hindrance to one’s ability to work will qualify them for fibromyalgia disability benefits.

Considering this fact, to win a fibromyalgia disability benefit case, it would be very beneficial if you have some other medical diagnosis along with Fibromyalgia disability to strengthen and to add more viability to the case.

In addition, a fibromyalgia diagnosis made by an Orthopedist or a Rheumatologist will receive greater attention by the Social Security Administration compared to the ones made only by a family doctor.