Imagine a bucked tooth teenager, who is stressed, hormonal, and emotional, discovering her dentist has contracted a blood-borne disease from an injury. No matter how great her dentist is, the parents will always think of the best interests of their child. The parent then goes in search of another dentist along with all the other parents in the waiting room.
This incident leaves the medical professional without a source of income while trying to manage their illness. This worst-case scenario would be covered under Income Protection Insurance.
Income Protection Insurance is a policy that can be designed to cater for your particular field of medicine, in this case, focusing on coverage for a dentist. This will take into account all the possible workplace-based hazards as well as personal health issues.
The policy can payout at 75% of the income generated by yourself at the time of taking out the policy. Some policies have CPI indexation built into their schemes.
If you developed an illness, this type of policy would payout as long as your illness was covered by the scheme.
To make a claim, you would need to provide evidence that you could not work at all due to your illness or injury. You could also claim under one of the disability definitions – unable to perform all duties, had a loss of income or reduction in working hours.
In a recent article, the Medical Journal of Australia mentioned that financial and personal hardship is the main reason most medical professionals seek assistance from them. They are suffering ill health or an injury. Many are relying heavily on Centrelink payments.
Would a Centrelink payment cover your financial obligations? Just think of your dental practice costs, paying off dental training debts and daily living expenses. You may also need medical and rehabilitation treatments that would add to your financial burden.
It is better to be out of pocket for the monthly fee now than hit financial hardship if the unthinkable happened. To protect what you are working for today by taking out income protection insurance for tomorrow.