Testimony on Health and Family Care Leave for Federal Workers before the Joint Economic Committee and the House Subcommittee on the Federal Workforce, Postal Service, and the District of Columbia

Short-Term Disability Insurance (SDI) follows the standard logic of other kinds of insurance
programs, such as health or life insurance, workers’ compensation, or unemployment insurance:
They pool individuals in order to spread the cost of a given individual’s experience with an
underlying risk among a large group, protecting each individual against the potentially
devastating cost of the covered event. SDI provides temporary, partial wage replacement to
employees who are unable to work because of non-work-related illness or injury.