The top analyst at the American Council of Life Insurers is observing Disability Insurance Awareness Month by thinking about the kinds of data policy makers need to understand the country’s paycheck protection gaps.
Andrew Melnyk, the chief economist at the ACLI, talks about disability insurance data definitions and needs in a new commentary.
(Related: Maybe Employers Are Ready to Be Aware of Disability Insurance)
In the commentary, which was published on the Council for Disability Awareness (CDC) website, Melnyk was responding to another CDA commentary, about workers’ ownership, or lack of ownership, of private disability insurance.
Melnyk notes in the commentary that one important question is whether individual workers have private disability insurance, but that another important, somewhat different question is whether households, and the people in the households, have protection from private disability insurance.
Still another question is definining the class of people who ought to have disability insurance, Melnyk rights.
Traditionally, federal survey programs have assumed that the people who need disability insurance are adults workers who are too young to collect Social Security benefits. That has been adult workers under age 65. The “normal” Social Security retirement age has now increaed to 66 and is on track to increase to 67 for people born in 1960 or later.