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.
Источники: действие
Реестр утверждений
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1/2 источников независимо дословно сверены с указанным источником
[1]Economics Letters 2022;216:110594 / S. Sai Krishnan & Subramanian S. Iyer — Can waste aversion affect demand for insurance? Evidence from experiment and survey
Рецензируемая публикация
Waste averters demand lower insurance coverage than non-waste averters — the discouraging thought of having 'wasted' premiums if no loss occurs reduces the amount of coverage people buy
Выдержка
“"Evidence shows that people are discouraged from buying fair insurance by the thought that if they do not suffer a loss, they will have wasted their money. We extend this theory to test if waste aversion could lead to a reduction in the amount of coverage sought. We deploy a multimethod design wherein we first run incentive-compatible experiments to establish a cause-and-effect relationship. We follow it up with a survey rolled out to actual buyers of insurance to generate external validity for our results. Our findings show that waste averters demand lesser insurance coverage than non-waste averters."
”
Данные источника:
2022-07-01
Дата обращения
2026-06-30
Расчёт
Krishnan & Iyer (Economics Letters 2022;216:110594) establish, via incentive-compatible experiments plus a survey of actual insurance buyers, that "waste aversion" — anticipated regret over premiums paid without a claim — causally lowers the amount of coverage demanded. This source documents the MECHANISM behind buyer regret on the action side; it does not report a quantified regret rate (the action regret_rate is anchored on the LIMRA lapse figure below, not on this paper).
[2]LIMRA — Disability Insurance Awareness Month: Is Your Income Protected?
Проверено
Авторитетный справочник
30% of employees who dropped disability insurance cited 'not using the benefit enough to be worth it' as their reason
Выдержка
“"Employees who previously had coverage but dropped their disability insurance cited increasing costs (31%), not using the benefit enough to be worth it (30%), and wanting to reduce overall benefit spending (27%) as their primary reasons."
”
Данные источника:
2025-05-01
Дата обращения
2026-05-13
Проверка
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Расчёт
LIMRA's 2025 workplace benefits research. The 30% "not using the benefit enough to be worth it" response among lapsed policyholders is the industry's closest published metric to post-purchase regret for disability insurance buyers, and is used here as the action-side regret_rate anchor (0.30). It aligns with the waste-aversion mechanism documented by Krishnan & Iyer (2022). Note that this population self-selected into lapsing — unconditional buyer regret among all current policyholders is likely lower, so 0.30 is best read as an upper-bound proxy among the subgroup most prone to it.
Источники: бездействие
Реестр утверждений
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2/3 источников независимо дословно сверены с указанным источником
[1]Guardian Life Insurance Company of America — Role of Disability Insurance in Financial Wellness
Проверено
Первичное исследование
8 in 10 workers who experienced a disability leave without disability insurance say they have not yet fully recovered financially
Выдержка
“"Among those lacking disability coverage, 8 in 10 say they have not yet fully recovered financially following a disability event. Individuals with disability insurance experienced significantly less negative financial consequences (38% negatively impacted) compared to those without coverage (62% negatively impacted)."
”
Данные источника:
2024-01-01
Дата обращения
2026-05-13
Проверка
Выдержка независимо повторно загружена и подтверждена слово в слово по указанному источнику в ходе нашей проверки достоверности.
Расчёт
Guardian's workplace benefits study surveyed US full-time workers, of whom 3 in 10 households reported at least one disability leave in the past 10 years. Among those who lacked disability insurance during that leave, 80% (8 in 10) reported incomplete financial recovery. We use 0.80 as the inaction regret rate — not a literal "regret" question, but incomplete financial recovery is the operational consequence that drives retrospective regret about skipping coverage. The insured cohort's 38% negative-impact rate versus the uninsured's 62% negative-impact rate corroborates the large gap. Total sample reported at approximately 1,492 workers across disability-leave households; the uninsured sub-sample is smaller.
[2]LIMRA — Disability Insurance Awareness Month: Protecting Your Paycheck and Your Future
Авторитетный справочник
46% of US adults say they need disability insurance; only 18% report having it; 48% of uninsured say they would tap personal savings if unable to work
Выдержка
“"Less than 1 in 5 consumers (18%) say they have disability insurance. Consumers without disability insurance coverage say their families would resort to tapping into personal savings (48%) or retirement funds (26%) to meet their day-to-day expenses if they became unable to work."
”
Данные источника:
2024-05-01
Дата обращения
2026-05-13
Расчёт
LIMRA's 2024 Insurance Barometer Study data. The coverage-gap statistic (46% say they need it; 18% have it) establishes the scale of involuntary non-ownership. The coping- mechanism data (48% would drain savings, 26% retirement funds) illustrates the downstream financial distress that makes inaction the regret-dominant path. Used here as corroborating context, not a direct regret rate.
[3]Council for Disability Income Awareness (CDIA) — Disability Statistics
Проверено
Авторитетный справочник
Just under 1 in 4 of today's 20-year-olds can expect to be out of work for at least a year due to a disabling condition before reaching normal retirement age (per SSA probability tables); at least 51 million US working adults lack disability insurance beyond basic Social Security coverage (per an ACLI analysis of 2022 Census data); medically related work loss was cited as a contributor in 44.3% of personal bankruptcies (per Himmelstein et al., American Journal of Public Health, 2019)
Выдержка
“"Just under one in four of today's 20-year-olds can expect to be out of work for at least a year because of a disabling condition before they reach the normal retirement age." "At least 51 million working adults in the United States are without disability insurance other than the basic coverage available through Social Security." "44.3% specifically citing medically-related work loss as a contributor" [to personal bankruptcy].
”
Данные источника:
2026-03-30
Дата обращения
2026-07-03
Проверка
Выдержка независимо повторно загружена и подтверждена слово в слово по указанному источнику в ходе нашей проверки достоверности.
Расчёт
CDIA's statistics page aggregates three figures used in the body prose that were previously stated without any citation. The 1-in-4 disability-probability figure is attributed by CDIA to SSA's Disability and Death Probability Tables for Insured Workers Who Attain Age 20 in 2025; the 51-million uninsured-workers figure is attributed to an ACLI analysis of 2022 Census data and the 2020 Strategic Business Insights MacroMonitor Household Survey; the 44.3%-of-bankruptcies figure is attributed to Himmelstein, Lawless, Thorne, Foohey & Woolhandler, "Medical Bankruptcy: Still Common Despite the Affordable Care Act," American Journal of Public Health 109, no. 3 (2019): 431-433 -- the body now cites that AJPH study directly for the bankruptcy figure rather than crediting CDIA (a secondary compiler) with having "found" it. Added to ground three previously-uncited body claims; does not change the inaction regret_rate (0.80).
Оговорки
The two regret signals are not directly comparable survey instruments — action-side regret is proxied by the stated reason lapsed policyholders give for dropping coverage ("not using the benefit enough to be worth it," a waste-aversion sentiment), while inaction-side regret is measured via post-event financial non-recovery (a consequence proxy, not a self-reported regret question). No published study has directly asked both insured and uninsured workers the same regret question after a disability event, so the regret_delta is an approximation constructed from separate data sources. The inaction group is conditioned on actually experiencing a disability leave — workers who never became disabled and skipped coverage may feel no regret at all, which means the population-level inaction regret rate across all workers is substantially lower than the 80% figure (which applies only to those who needed the coverage). Disability income insurance is also not available or affordable for all workers: self-employed workers, gig workers, and those with pre-existing conditions face access constraints that complicate the action/inaction framing. Premium costs vary significantly with occupation, age, and benefit period. Short-term and long-term disability insurance are distinct products with different elimination periods and benefit durations; the sources above do not consistently separate them.
