Disability Insurance

I wonder if its degrading to the point where it's becoming a scam?

Until a few years ago, Debra Potter made sure that her family could cruise the Caribbean, watch the NFL on big-screen TV and keep her elderly mother and in-laws at home in comfort.

She did so by earning $250,000 a year selling more insurance than almost anybody else in the state of Virginia, virtually all of it disability and health policies that she thought put a safety net under middle-class and affluent families such as her own.

Potter so believed in the protection she was providing that she made sure she was covered under a policy her employer, Southeastern financial services giant BB&T, had with UnumProvident Corp., the nation's largest disability insurer.

But when Potter began falling down in 2002 and was subsequently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, she discovered that the protection didn't work anything like she'd expected.

... The $10.5-billion-a-year insurer denies mishandling Potter's case, saying only that "new information" caused it to change its position and start paying.

"People need safety nets, and that's what I thought I was selling them," Potter said. "But here I am with all my knowledge of insurance and I couldn't make it work for me."