Workers who become disabled and lack income-replacement coverage face an abrupt income cliff. The Social Security Administration estimates that one in four of today’s 20-year-olds will experience a qualifying disability before reaching retirement age, yet LIMRA’s 2024 Insurance Barometer Study found fewer than one in five US adults carry any disability income insurance — a gap of roughly 51 million working adults. Guardian Life’s workplace benefits research found that among households that actually experienced a disability leave without coverage, 80% reported they had not fully recovered financially years later, compared with 38% financial harm among workers who held disability insurance during the same event. The asymmetry is large and consistent across data sources.
Regret among buyers is real but structurally different. Insurance economics research documents a “waste aversion” dynamic: Krishnan and Iyer (2022) show experimentally that the thought of having “wasted” premiums when no loss occurs causally reduces the coverage people buy. LIMRA data on lapsed policyholders quantifies the same sentiment — 30% of workers who dropped disability coverage cited “not using the benefit enough to be worth it” as their stated reason. These figures describe an expectation of wasted spending rather than harm; the policyholder who never became disabled is, by definition, the one who avoided the outcome the policy was designed for. Buyer regret is primarily about the cost of an unused option, not about a worse life outcome.
The two regret types are not symmetric. Inaction regret, when it materializes, arrives alongside job loss, depleted savings, and delayed retirement — harms that are concrete and long-lasting. Research published in the American Journal of Public Health found that medically related work loss contributed to over 44% of US personal bankruptcies in one analysis, and households with a disabled adult require substantially more income to maintain equivalent living standards. Action regret, by contrast, is largely anticipatory: most buyers never claim, pay premiums throughout their working years, and may retrospectively question the cost. The evidence does not suggest that buyers who purchased and never claimed experienced lasting harm from having done so. Inaction dominates the regret calculus when conditioned on the event the coverage is designed to address.