Incapacity to work does not have to mean incapacity to pay the bills. Although an accident or sickness might have put you off work for a while, accident sickness insurance will ensure that during the time you need to recover, the household bills continue to be paid.
You might not feel that it is something you often have cause to do, but days off through accident or sickness are a lot more widespread than you might think. On any one day in Britain, for example, some 6 million people are off work through incapacity.
This is something that concerns employers, of course, since it has been calculated that they lose around £11 billion every year in lost productivity. No wonder, then, that many companies are either revising their sick pay schemes or dropping them altogether. There is no law that requires an employer to continue to pay a worker who is off sick or injured at their full rate of pay. The minimum payable after three days off sick is the very modest statutory sick pay, most of which the employer can then reclaim from the government.
As all companies across a generally faltering economy begin to cut back on costs and tighten their belts, sick pay schemes are being cut back. The retail giant, Tesco, for example has recently announced that it is cutting back on its sick pay for many workers.
As the security of guaranteed sick pay from your employer looks set to become a thing of the past, your own accident sickness insurance becomes even more of a safety net if you become incapacitated from working through an accident or sickness. Of course, that time off needs to be a reasonably serious event, with a “qualifying period” for the insurance pay out to be either 30 or 60 days, depending on the policy you choose. Some policies will treat that qualifying period as a form of “excess”, while others will then backdate the time for which benefits become payable to your first day off work.
One of the better accident sickness insurance policies, which has a qualifying period of just 30 days and then backdates the benefits payable to the first day of the claim, is that arranged by independent insurance providers, British Insurance, who also sell some of the most reasonably-priced policies on the market. The company’s managing director, Simon Burgess, says that “with more and more employers cutting back on their sick pay schemes, employees would be well advised to make their own provision for lost income from accident or sickness with accident sickness insurance”.
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