Podcast Center
Video Center
Webcasts
Resource Center
Events
November 14, 2013 at 10:48 AM
A 3-judge panel at the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided unanimously to ask a lower court to review a case filed by a group long-term disability (LTD) insurance claimant from scratch.
The panel, in Richmond, Va., found that a U.S. District Court judge in Greensboro, N.C., erred when he threw out the suit.
Beth Cosey, a former medical diagnostics company marketing manager at BioMerieux Inc., filed the suit against Prudential Insurance Company of America, the claims administrator for her employer’s group LTD plan. Cosey, who worked in Durham, N.C., applied for group LTD benefits in 2007 because of a list of complaints that included fatigue, low blood pressure, weight loss, and sleep apnea.
Prudential, a unit of Prudential Financial Inc. (NYSE:PRU), started out agreeing to pay benefits, but it decided after three weeks to cut off benefits payments because it decided that Cosey had presented too little evidence to show that she was unable to perform her regular occupation.
The group LTD plan had a provision that said a claimant had to “submit proof of continuing disability satisfactory to Prudential.”
Prudential argued that the phrase established that the plan had a “discretionary clause” — a provision that gives an administrator of an Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) plan broad freedom to review policy-related terms without fear of seeing a case being reviewed from by a court from scratch.
