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Comment by lesinski | Hacker News Reader

It baffles me how few people have disability insurance. What would you do if injured your hands and could never type again? What would your family do? Everyone should have disability insurance -- it should be a fundamental part of your financial life.

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> What would you do if injured your hands and could never type again?

I don't disagree with your general point, but the truth is, there are a lot of adaptations and assistive input devices people use for computer input all the time. There are lots of ways a techie with a functional brain can continue to work even after quite severe injuries.

Isnt this what social security disability is supposed to cover? Obviously it won't give you as much money as a private plan, but it wouldnt be a total disaster.

Getting social security disability is a small nightmare and can take months. The majority of initial claims (60%+) are rejected and you'll have to appeal.

Which, you know, is no problem at all if you're actually so injured you can't work.

Months/years and a lawyer.

Months? Try years.

Heh.

I wanted to be truthful and didn't know off the top of my head what, say, the median time for a claim to be accepted was.

I remember it being something like 2-5 months to get a response, so multiply that by the number of appeals (up to 4, I think) and my ballpark estimate is that the median time-to-acceptance for all eventually-accepted claims is around 6-18 months.

So, I figured saying "could take months" was a more honest thing than saying "could take years." If the median time were greater than a year, after all, "it could take months" is still true, but the converse isn't true! If I had said "years" instead of "months" and was wrong, someone could easily have replied, saying, "You're exaggerating. The median time to acceptance is 9 months, not years. The claims that take years are exceptional cases."

In any case, I didn't know, so I wanted to err on the side of intellectual honesty. That'll teach me. :P

Also, I don't know if you (and the other person who replied with the same comment) have ever heard of Wiio's Laws: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/wiio.html

One corollary of those laws is this: "If nobody barks at you, your message did not get through." :)

Heh, sorry about my reply. I was just speaking from being on the end of having a parent who went through the process. I seem to remember it taking on the order of more than a year. Good news is it is retroactive from when you apply though. This was over 20 years ago, things might have changed since.

I am also flummoxed. Private short term disability insurance seems very common, but I'm not sure I've ever heard of private long term disability insurance.

This is in the UK, but is vaguely applicaple to the situation you describe, so take with a pinch of salt. A friend of mine had an accident about two months back and is unable to work. Despite having been certified as such by at least two psychiatrists and a whole host of other NHS staff, disability benefits don't kick in for six months due to the nature of his new found disability. I guess you're up shit creek if you don't have six months worth of savings in place.

In any risk assessment, one must balance impact with likelihood.

> What would you do if injured your hands and could never type again?

I don't even disagree with you, but have a tangent to share:

Have you seen modern robotic prosthetics? I don't want to make light of anyone's situation, but I honestly think we are mere decades away from replacements that are better.

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