Disability insurance can forge the path toward health equity

The past several years have brought societal inequities into the active social consciousness of the country. As a result, companies are reckoning with their own intrinsic values, the values of their workforce, and how much they should work to align them.

At first glance, health equity seems like a topic too large and out-of-scope for benefits and insurance professionals to address through their work, but underneath that big-picture headline is space for advisers to add value to this important goal.

While client advisers do not have the ability to write laws and regulations that could help level the playing field, they can be a small, but meaningful force for positive change.

Read more: Implementing a 360-degree approach to your disability benefits

Disability is an often-overlooked, yet very important, line of coverage. Currently, there are 51 million working adults in the U.S. without disability insurance, while more than 375,000 Americans become totally disabled each year. In the U.S. today, there are more than 8 million adults who have a disability that prevents them from working. Sadly, Americans are five times more likely to become disabled than die but they are more financially prepared for death. These statistics highlight the need for disability insurance — and advisers are in a position to help these numbers shift in the right direction. Early in my career, I was fortunate to consult with a New York-based publishing house. Human Resources was filled with lovely professionals who not only cared about their work, but who truly cared about if their employees were getting enough benefit from their insurance plans.

Printing and distribution were conducted from a relatively low-income area in Western New York. But for as caring as this company was, they did not want to provide any short-term disability coverage above and beyond what is mandated by New York State Disability Benefits Law (DBL), which is 50% of earnings up to $170/week before taxes. The company believed that if the state had determined that this amount was sufficient, that it was, and no amount of advice would change its thinking.

Read more: 3 key ways disability insurance can support working parents

About two years into our working relationship, I received a voice message that one of the warehouse workers had passed away. Although the HR department knew how to file the life insurance claim, the company still needed to speak urgently: the employee had died on the warehouse floor from cancer. Apparently, his illness had been progressing for months but he could not take time away from work for treatments because he could not afford to live on the $170/week statutory benefit. The company wanted to implement a short-term disability policy with the earliest possible effective date.

This scenario illustrates how health equity can easily be overlooked on any given day. A meaningful short-term disability plan can actually make the difference between choosing to get care or not. While disability coverage was certainly a known factor here, there were certainly other factors in play: income and trust in the healthcare system, to name a few. But the bottom line is that what stood between this man and cancer treatments was the lack of something as simple and inexpensive as a short-term disability policy.

Unfortunately, the client had to learn this lesson in a most-devastating manner, but it is incumbent on advisors to become their clients’ thought partners, supporting and educating them along the way so they don’t need a tragedy to force their hands.

Not all coverages are created with equal value. Is it as important to have a life policy with high death benefits? Maybe. Could an employer shift some of those dollars to putting a meaningful short-term disability policy in place? Depending on the needs of the specific employer in question, the answer may be yes. An adviser won’t know until he or she has the conversation, but this will allow him or her to become an even great-trusted adviser, further cementing the relationship. Advisers don’t need to solve health equity, but should be aware there are simple actions that can help level the playing field.