MetLife Lifts Curtain on New Disability Management Offering

The new product provides greater flexibility for employers to manage disability absences, expands employee-focused benefits, and enhances employers’ return-to-work/stay-at-work strategies for their employees, according to the firm.

New features available in the contract include:

• Options for combining or separating limited benefit durations for a number of absence conditions to accommodate a variety of employer objectives
• The capability to combine term life insurance and disability insurance within the same certificate provided by MetLife
• A Terminal Illness Benefit that provides 100% of pre-disability earnings to the employee, for up to 12 consecutive months, if diagnosed as terminally ill while disabled
• An option to accelerate survivorship benefits if diagnosed as terminally ill while disabled
• An Organ Donor Benefit, which, among other things, provides for an increase in short term disability benefits when the disability absence is the result of donating an organ
• A Moving Expense Incentive which reimburses employees for moving expenses to a new residence if recommended as part of the rehabilitation program approved by MetLife.

MetLife says that underlying the new contract is a claim analysis system that directs more serious health conditions to medical and vocational specialists capable of greater clinical intervention.