Credit: Syda Productions/Adobe Stock
Jeremy Horner spent 2025 the way he always does: banging his head against brick walls.
Horner is the executive vice president for individual disability insurance and corporate development at Standard Insurance Company.
He's responsible for educating Americans, and Americans' financial advisors, about the idea that they should insure their most important asset — their ability to earn an income — against the risk of disability.
That's a tough job.
"It's very hard to get the attention of advisors," Horner said in a recent email interview. "Financial advisors are doing their clients a disservice by not selling their clients disability insurance policies while they are young and healthy. Many advisors make the bulk of their income on asset management planning and do not have the time, expertise, or desire to sell disability insurance."
Horner is predicting that 2026 will be a year when some support comes from allies in and around corporate boardrooms: the people who help keep the most talented executives and professionals from going somewhere else.
Today, "more human resources teams are recognizing the importance of having guaranteed standard issue individual disability insurance for their higher earners as a retentive benefit," he said.
Guaranteed standard issue disability insurance: Many companies offer employer-paid group disability insurance, but those tend to have benefits limits that are too low to meet the needs of companies' highest-paid employees, or even the needs of mid-level executives in expensive cities like Boston, Los Angeles and New York.
Some companies offer highly paid employees a chance to buy more disability insurance at the worksite, but the employees often have to provide evidence of insurability to get much extra coverage.
Similarly, highly paid employees can buy their own individual disability insurance away from work, but they may have to go through a rigorous underwriting process to get the extra protection.
If an employer offers access to GSI disability insurance, highly paid employees can benefit from getting a solid level of income protection without facing much, or any, medical underwriting. Access to GSI disability could be especially valuable to executives who face conditions such as obesity, heart failure or multiple sclerosis.
The backdrop: U.S. issuers of individual disability insurance generated $479 million in sales and $5.5 billion in revenue from all policies in force in 2024, compared with $487 million in sales and $5.3 billion in revenue from in-force policies in 2023, according to survey data from Gen Re.
Seven of the 16 insurers that participated in the Gen Re survey provided data on sales of guaranteed standard issue disability.
New sales of GSI disability increased 22% in 2024, to $80 million.
Total revenue for in-force GSI disability policies rose 9.5%, to $504 million.
Employers paid 59% of the premiums for new GSI disability sales in 2024, and employees paid 41% of the premiums.
For the in-force GSI policies, employers paid 41% of the premiums and employees paid 59% of the premiums.
A vanishing trend: In the recent past, Horner might have wondered if an increase in claims due to the impact of COVID-19 and long COVID could be a trend in the coming year.
COVID and long COVID are not on Horner's list of top individual disability concerns for 2026.
"After almost six years since the first outbreaks of COVID, we're happy to have identified that COVID and long COVID have not had material lingering effects on individual disability insurance claims," Horner said.
Credit: Syda Productions/Adobe Stock
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