Disability Insurance Awareness Month with CDIA President Bob Herum [Podcast]

A doctor who could no longer practice medicine after a neurological diagnosis started painting watercolors and selling them to make up what his disability benefits did not cover. His policy had been sufficient when he first bought it, but his income had grown beyond what the coverage was designed to replace, and no one had reviewed it in the years between. Bob Herum was a young agent at Provident at the time, delivering benefit checks to that doctor’s door, and one of those watercolors has hung in his hallway ever since. Herum is the president of the Council for Disability Income Awareness, a nonprofit whose mission is to make sure working Americans understand what income protection is before they need it. He entered the disability insurance business in 1986 after eight and a half years of military service, spent fourteen years as a vice president of sales and marketing at Provident, one of the country’s largest disability carriers, and has spent the past two and a half years rebuilding the CDIA after the organization went through a difficult leadership transition. The CDIA, which recently added the word “income” to its name to distinguish its mission from general disability services, now reaches nearly 40,000 agents and advisors and has expanded its membership to include Munich Re, major general agencies such as Ash Brokerage and DI Brokers East, and carrier members including Principal, Unum, and Lincoln Financial. I sat down with Herum on the Income Protection Journal Podcast during Disability Insurance Awareness Month to talk about the painting, the doctor, and what he has observed across four decades watching what happens when working Americans are covered and when they are not. It is a conversation I plan to return to. The Gap Most Workers With Group Coverage Have Never Thought to Check The story of the watercolor doctor is not unusual. The disability does not always arrive with drama. It comes from a neurological issue, a cancer diagnosis, a hand injury, a joint that stops cooperating. What makes it costly is the gap between what a worker assumes their coverage does and what the certificate of insurance actually says. Most workers with employer-provided coverage have never read that certificate. Herum spent ten years marketing group long-term disability and short-term disability products, and he is direct about what most of those plans do and do not cover. The benefit is typically 60 percent of base salary, calculated only on compensation from that employer. The portion the employer pays is taxable as federal income tax. And the coverage does not follow the worker if they change jobs. “Do you realize that if you leave that employer, that coverage stays with the company? It doesn’t travel with you,” Herum says. Most group long-term disability plans also include a provision that, after an initial period, shifts the definition of disability from inability to perform your own occupation to inability to perform any occupation at all. For a physician, attorney, or specialist whose income depends on a specific set of skills, that shift matters. Herum’s consistent message is not that group coverage is inadequate across the board. It is that very few workers have taken the time to understand what they actually have. The organizing idea behind the CDIA is that most people do not make a conscious decision to leave themselves unprotected. They make an unconscious one. They receive an enrollment form at work, they mean to look into it, and they never do. “Their lack of planning becomes their plan,” Herum says. The statistic the CDIA returns to is not an abstraction. A Milliman study confirmed what Herum first encountered in 1986: one out of four working Americans will experience at least a 90-day disability during their working career. “If I knew that there was a 25 percent chance that when I crossed the road, I was going to get hit by a car, I probably wouldn’t cross the road,” Herum says. The problem is not that people reject the risk when they confront it. The problem is that most people never confront it clearly enough to make a real decision. The Resources the CDIA Makes Available to Agents and Working Americans The tools the CDIA produces are free and available at cdia.org. For agents and advisors, there is a database of nearly 40,000 professionals receiving regular outreach, a library of more than 900 blog articles organized by coverage topic, training sessions focused on specific policy mechanics, and marketing materials designed to support client conversations year-round. For the working American who lands on the site, the CDIA is building video content designed to help answer a basic question: what do I actually have, and is it enough? One newer program certifies employers whose disability benefit offerings meet a defined standard. Herum envisions the database becoming a tool workers use when comparing job offers, letting them see which employers have built a real disability program rather than a nominal one. The first certificate was awarded days before our conversation. Carriers including Unum are already marketing the program to their employer clients. I work with high-income professionals and self-employed individuals on individual disability income coverage built around the specifics of their occupation and income. The coverage I place is structured differently from what most group plans provide, and understanding those differences before something goes wrong is exactly what Disability Insurance Awareness Month is designed to prompt. Herum’s framing is that every month should carry that prompt. May is the annual occasion to raise the conversation. The CDIA’s job is to make sure the conversation keeps happening in June, October, and January as well. The full conversation, including Herum’s account of a second claim story from his early career in Columbus involving a dentist who redirected his career to managing practices after his own disability, and his view on why only four out of every 100 licensed agents discuss disability insurance with their clients, is available on the Income Protection Journal Podcast. The resources he describes are at cdia.org.