by varxoven » Sat Oct 02, 2010 02:58 am
1. Best rated companies providing accidental life insurance to AMERICAN CITIZENS for INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL.
2. Is there a limit ( like based on income, etc ) for the insured amount.
3. Can the beneficiary be someone else besides the spouse or children?
4. What is considered an accident and what not?
5. How it's gonna be investigated?........is it true that the insurance companies do everything possible to present an accidental death as being some sort of normal health condition event and deny the claim?
2. Is there a limit ( like based on income, etc ) for the insured amount.
3. Can the beneficiary be someone else besides the spouse or children?
4. What is considered an accident and what not?
5. How it's gonna be investigated?........is it true that the insurance companies do everything possible to present an accidental death as being some sort of normal health condition event and deny the claim?
Posted: Sun Oct 03, 2010 04:00 am Post Subject:
accidental life insurance
This is a misnomer. There is life insurance (dead is dead) and there is accidental death benefits (dead by accident is dead, dead from any other cause is too bad and might as well not have paid for the insurance).
How can you spot the difference easily? Life insurance requires an application (usually multiple pages) and (probably) medical underwriting above a certain amount of coverage. Premiums will be hundreds or thousands of dollars per year.
An insurer offering accidental death benefits could care less about your health, since a medical death is not covered, so the application for their policy is usually one page. All they really care about is whether you have a bank account they can draft for your monthly premium which might be as little as $10 or $20 per month.
What is considered an accident and what not?
If you don't want to be concerned with the answer to that question, you need LIFE INSURANCE, not accidental death benefits.
Posted: Sat Oct 09, 2010 10:54 am Post Subject:
is it true that the insurance companies do everything possible to present an accidental death as being some sort of normal health condition event and deny the claim?
Probably you need to present a number of documents in order to confirm that the death was indeed caused by an accident. I guess you'll need to show a doctor's certificate stating the cause (or the death certificate) which is to be followed by post-mortem details, police report etc. If there's anything suspicious or if you fail to present a named doc, then probably the claim will be further investigated or cancelled.
Posted: Mon Oct 11, 2010 12:36 pm Post Subject:
What is considered an accident and what not?
Usually, it should cover mishaps on road that bear the risk of death.
Can the beneficiary be someone else besides the spouse or children?
If the carrier is not too worried about your health, then I see no reason why they'd bother about your beneficiary. But yeah, you need to go through the offer doc very carefully.
Posted: Mon Oct 11, 2010 02:42 pm Post Subject:
If the carrier is not too worried about your health, then I see no reason why they'd bother about your beneficiary.
Steven . . .
I'm surprised by your answer. Your insurance knowledge is better than that. Any policy that provides a "death benefit" -- including "accidental death" policies such as travel accident insurance -- allows the insured to name a beneficiary to receive the proceeds.
Naming a beneficiary, in any policy that allows it, has nothing to do with the "health" of the insured. It is only about giving instructions to the insurance company with regard to whom the death benefit will be paid, instead of having to pay it to a dead person's estate, then leaving it up to a court to parcel the money out to creditors first, and perhaps leaving nothing to anyone the dead insured would have wanted the money to go to in the first place.
"Life Insurance for International Travel" is usually not life insurance, but is an accidental (i.e., "travel accident") death benefit instead. The only death payable under such policies is one that is determined to be "accidental". Death doesn't have to happen "on the road" so to speak.
As such, it may require the death of the insured to occur as a pedestrian (as in being struck by a moving vehicle) or while being conveyed as an "occupant" by a "common carrier" (taxi, towncar, bus, subway, passenger airliner, ferry, moving sidewalk, escalator, elevator, etc -- but NOT while in a private passenger auto (including one's own rental car) or general aviation aircraft).
Death that results from medical causes, such as heart attack, stroke, food poisoning, cancer, etc, is not covered. Choking to death on a piece of food would be an accident, but dying as the result of a known food allergy, even though the offending food (such as certain seafood or nut products) was inadvertently ingested, might not be an "accident".
"Accidents" are most commonly defined as: "An accident is a specific, identifiable, unexpected, unusual and unintended external action which occurs in a particular time and place, without apparent or deliberate cause but with marked effects." Such a definition could exclude both murder and suicide as an accident (some states do not allow such exclusions under the definition of accident). Notice the word "external" -- that is an important tidbit of vocabulary.
Accidental death benefits are sometimes added by rider to life insurance policies in order to increase the total amount payable to a beneficiary if the death results from an accidental cause ("double indemnity" or "triple indemnity"). Dead is dead, and the policy pays. Dead by accident, and the policy pays more that dead by other causes.
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