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Medical professionals

How specialist insurance advice makes all the difference to doctors

Priority Life offers expert advice on risk insurance to the medical fraternity.

The team at Priority Life understand that becoming a doctor requires a high level of cognitive ability and, for procedural specialities, a superior level of dexterity. Insurance policies designed for ‘every-Australian’ are unlikely to deliver in ‘grey-areas’ such as partial incapacity, blood-borne virus infection and where locums are employed.

This is why Priority Life exists.

We ensure that our clients cover is tailored to their personal circumstances and most importantly, specific to your occupation.

Key considerations for doctors

Own occupation specific cover

Disability refers to when a person is unable to function in a so called ‘normal’ capacity. Considering the nature of a doctor’s work, it’s important for disability cover to relate to the specifics they do and relate to the potentially huge loss of financial gain that they would have if they were disabled.

The Priority Life service delves into the specifics of what own occupation needs to look like and we seek to cover it from multiple angles. Not only do we want our clients to be covered if they cannot do the duties of their own occupation, we consider whether a reduction in hours that they are able to work will prompt a claim as well as a loss of income due to a sickness or injury.

The ability to work up to 10 hours a week in one’s own occupation is particularly valuable for self-employed people who often need to continue working in some capacity while they are otherwise fully off work (disabled).

Agreed value on income protection

Just like insuring assets, e.g. a car, can be done on an agreed value or one that can be reduced such as market value; income protection can be set up on either Agreed or Indemnity cover.

Agreed insurance is typically sort after by doctors in private practice and doctors who are experiencing an increase to their income such as newly qualified professionals. The latter, often face a distinct challenge in getting agreed cover as their prior income e.g.: whilst doing their Fellowship year, is typically much less than what they will be earning once their private practice is up and running. This often means they can’t get the level of agreed value cover they are seeking.

As part of our Priority Life service, we negotiate special arrangements for this group with key providers to solve this problem.

Needlestick cover

For some doctors a key concern is acquiring HIV or Hepatitis B and C from a needlestick injury.

Some income protection policies will provide a booster payment for this event free of charge, others will offer it as an additional cost and some policies won’t cover it at all.

Rather than assuming every doctor is seeking this booster cover we discuss their potential risk and their concerns around it and if the cover is to be included, we pay particular attention to the offerings of each insurer.

Major flaws with many super based covers

While a nominal amount of income protection is often included with superannuation funds, most of these offerings include a very problematic clause in their policy wordings.

Many policies include an offset of other income protection policies which means that technically, there is no value in having another policy because if you take out a second policy, you can’t claim on it.

We have also discovered other issues with these policies, such as:

Payments are only based on base salary and do not include other employment benefits e.g. overtime and super.
Cover is on an Indemnity basis, meaning payouts can be reduced where income has been reduced at the time.
Cover cannot be set as level which means that premiums are escalating with age.
A situation where the client is redeployed within the public health system e.g.: medical administrator, would result in no payments to the client.
You can only access your benefit if you have used up all your sick leave.

Business expenses

Business expenses Insurance is most relevant to self-employed medical professionals who would have significant ongoing expenses if they were disabled (on a month by month basis). Without it, they would typically need to fund these expenses either through their Income Protection, their cash reserves, or go into debt. These expenses are mostly made up of staffing costs and premises leasing costs while they are off work.

Unfortunately, this is an area of cover that is often neglected and seems to be an afterthought for advisers and clients and can be a real problem when it’s not in place. One of the key problems we have found with certain policies is that partial disability is not included.

Why do you need risk advice?

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Case Studies

We investigate the ‘fine print’

A surgeon in the prime of his career came to us to review his insurances.

He has cover through a major insurer as well as some Income Protection cover through a major Queensland based superannuation scheme.

To do his dismay we discovered that his Income Protection through the super scheme would not be payable if he was receiving a claim through the major insurer, essentially, he was paying thousands of dollars to this cover that he could never claim on.

Once this was identified we recommended a policy that covered his full benefit amount and stopped the payments of premium to the redundant policy.

We help protect the otherwise uninsurable.

A 63 y/o business owner is not able to establish a new TPD policy because of his age.

Priority Life negotiated with the insurance company to make a special offer to the satisfaction of the client.

We ensure fair claims assessment.

61 y/o client suffers a heart attack. Surgeon inserted 4 stents rather than a by-pass surgery.

Insurer rejected the trauma claim as the definition of a heart attack under the trauma contract requires by-pass surgery.

Priority Life interceded and worked with the company and client, as a result the decision on the claim was changed, and the client received a payout of $500,000.