Disability Insurance for College Athletes
In a recent article, written in the wake of NCAA basketball player Kevin Ware’s traumatic leg fracture, The Atlantic explores whether college athletes should purchase disability insurance.
Like doctors and dentists, whose physical health can be crucial to performing their job duties, many professional athletes purchase disability insurance. By doing so, they attempt to protect their income from sickness or injury that interferes with their work.
For college athletes, disability insurance is intended to protect potential, future income that they expect to earn once drafted to professional sports teams. Because the term of the policies is so short – ordinarily just one to two years – and the potential benefits so high – often millions – these disability policies can be extremely expensive. The article discusses athletes and their families that paid upwards of $40,000 in premiums over one or two years.
As the article explains, though, this type of disability insurance is rarely collected. Though these athletes’ disability insurance policies are unique, the difficulty of collecting may sound familiar to many other types of professionals facing disability insurance claims:
[T]hese policies, meant to hedge against risk, are risky in themselves: None of these student-athletes is likely to ever collect a dime, even if they are hurt. These guarantees cover “permanent total disability,” meaning only policyholders who are never able set foot on a field or court again—not simply those who suffer injuries that may reduce their earning potential—can file a claim.
Read the full article here: The $5 Million Question: Should College Athletes Buy Disability Insurance?
