The Safety Net She Believed In Was Pulled Away When She Fell

She did so by earning $250,000 a year selling more insurance than almost anybody else in the state of Virginia, virtually all of it disability and health policies that she thought put a safety net under middle-class and affluent families such as her own.

Potter so believed in the protection she was providing that she made sure she was covered under a policy her employer, Southeastern financial services giant BB&T, had with UnumProvident Corp., the nation's largest disability insurer.

But when Potter began falling down in 2002 and was subsequently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, she discovered that the protection didn't work anything like she'd expected.

UnumProvident, whose policies the 50-year-old insurance agent had been selling, questioned whether Potter really was disabled and refused to pay her. Although the firm, based in Chattanooga, Tenn., relented a few weeks ago, the reversal took three years and did not come before the Potters had run through most of their savings, yanked one of their five children from college for lack of tuition and hired a lawyer.

The $10.5-billion-a-year insurer denies mishandling Potter's case, saying only that "new information" caused it to change its position and start paying.

"People need safety nets, and that's what I thought I was selling them," Potter said. "But here I am with all my knowledge of insurance and I couldn't make it work for me."

When middle-class Americans talk about safety nets, they usually mean such things as food stamps or housing subsidies -- public assistance on which generally only the poor depend. In fact, working people up and down the income spectrum lean heavily on a long list of protections such as healthcare coverage, unemployment compensation and pensions or 401(k)s.

But an examination of Potter's experience, UnumProvident's legal and regulatory record and the practices of several other insurers suggests that a key component of working Americans' protective shield fails with unnerving regularity.

Disability insurance -- now carried by more than 50 million Americans -- generally promises to replace at least half of a person's wages in case of illness or injury. However, in a substantial number of cases, especially those involving workers with long-term or permanent disabilities, it doesn't deliver.