In Honor of the Upcoming Veterans Day – How To Make Claims on Your Military Life Insurance

In honor of Veterans Day this year, I want to help the families of military veterans get their proper benefit checks for life insurance policies held by service persons. IF you have kept up your military group life insurance policy during service (if still in uniform) or after discharge, you (or rather your beneficiaries) should be able to get the VA to accept your claim. Just read this article and go to the link given below to find the claim form.

Several years ago a scandal broke out about the Veterans Administration denying all phone inquiries inre making claims on veterans group life insurance policies. It seemed that the staff was using the funds to pay for department parties and other nonsense.

I was also surprised to hear of one widow of a WWII veteran making a successful claim on her late husband's policy not long before this scandal broke out (about ten years ago). Fortunately for her, she had an adult child who sent in a request for a claim form instead of just accepting the erroneous information that had been received by phone. The veteran had kept policy status updates on file, and so they had a policy number and an address to send the request to.

So to make a long story short, they received the claim form – a mere half-page long – and filled in the necessary information. The only difficult section asked for the veteran's discharge date, an item they luckily had on the discharge papers.

Do you want to guess how much money the widow wound up with? The policy had been paid up some time before and was accruing interest. The final valuation was for over $6200. That was a very welcome hunk of change to help make up for the loss of her husband's pension check from work.

Below is the link to the VA insurance page. There are several forms available but to make a claim, click on the one that says: SGLV 8283, Claim for Death Benefits. There is also a related form to make claims for the death of a spouse (or other covered family member) of a military service person.
http://www.insurance.va.gov/sgliSite/forms/forms.htm

It does not matter how long ago your military service person or veteran died; the policy still accrues value until the claim is made. Just dig up your insurance policy and discharge papers, and you will have enough information to fill out the claim form.

Good luck to all of you, and thank you to all our United States veterans out there (and their families). Have a good day.

[The erroneous information given by phone was possibly a mixup; the VA continually has to deny inquiries about a mythical veterans insurance dividend payout. You can read a full article explaining that confusing urban myth at http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/weekly/aa050698.htm .]

MEDICAL CLAIMS

MEDICAL CLAIMS

Here I am going to lump together both doctor and hospital bills together, even though they use different claim forms. They are both medical claims as opposed to dental or prescription claims. We will also look at another type of medical claim and that is the one for medical supplies.

Thousands of policy owners are filing their own claims by sending in the receipt for the doctor visit. They are led to believe that this is sufficient but they are kept in (not so) blissful ignorance. You see, in most states laws were passed saying that insurance companies could not reject a claim because it was not on a claim form. And there are several insurers that help you by allowing you to print out a form off their websites online. This is helpful of them.

But the receipt, itemized bill, or even an EOB (explanation of benefits) is rarely enough because they lack the one essential item required to process your bill: the diagnosis code.

All claims for a medical expense require a diagnosis code for processing. (Most dental and prescription claims do not.) By diagnosis, I do not necessarily mean that the doctor arrives at a name for your condition or illness. The diagnosis code may reflect the fact of an annual exam, a flu shot, a clearance for participating in school sports, or other administrative reasons.