The biggest reason why a person decides to get a life insurance policy is to make sure that there will be financial assistance available to that person’s family after the person dies. Most people rely on life insurance benefits to help pay for the costs of the funeral, and other medical bills. Imagine the heartbreak of finding out that the life insurance policy on your loved on who passed away has been wiped out, due to an error the insurance company made!
For Debbie McShane, this nightmare was her reality. Her son, Michael Mocny, age 26, suffered from asthma his entire life. It was an especially bad experience with asthma that took his young life. Fortunately, Debbie McShane had a life insurance policy through the Prudential insurance company and had been faithfully paying the premiums for more than two decades. She paid $10,000 extra for a rider that would allow her life insurance policy to also cover her son. So, when she filed a claim after her son died, she expected everything to work out just fine.
Many insurance companies will attempt to use a loophole in order to avoid paying out claims on life insurance. Some of them will wait until a person dies, and then decide to comb through that person’s medical records, specifically hoping to find something they can point at, and use to deny coverage. That isn’t exactly what happened for Debbie McShane, however.
A representative from Prudential called Debbie McShane, and asked her to verify the year that her son, Michael Mocny, was born. Debbie McShane said he was born in 1983, which was the truth. The Prudential representative then informed her that she was “out of luck”. It turned out that someone at Prudential made an error when entering the data about the year Michael Mocny was born. The insurance company thought that he was born in 1988.
But, since he was actually born in 1983, it meant that Michael was 26 when he died. The Prudential representative said that they were not going to pay out on Debbie’s claim, because the expensive coverage she purchased ended when he turned 26. To add insult to injury, the Prudential representative insisted that the insurance company didn’t even have to let Debbie know about that, because the data entry error made it so the insurance company wasn’t aware of Michael’s true age. In short, Debbie’s claim would be denied, due to a mistake that was made by the insurance company.
If you have life insurance that covers your children, especially if it happens to be with Prudential, you may want to contact them, and make sure that there are no errors in your information. Perhaps you can prevent this problem from happening to you. Or, you can simply choose an insurance company that doesn’t treat it’s customers as badly as Prudential is treating Debbie McShane, instead.
Image by Ray Tibbitts on Flickr