One of the biggest benefits an employer can offer to employees is health insurance – and it seems like that would be especially important to employees who work in high-injury industries. But a new study from ValuePenguin, a personal finance website, suggests that workers in dangerous fields are actually less likely to have employer-sponsored health insurance than their counterparts in lower-risk jobs.
According to the research, over a third of all employees injured at work in 2020 did not have employer-sponsored health insurance, meaning they were almost 8% less likely to have coverage than the average employee across all industries. Moreover, the industries which have the highest rates of injuries – including the farming, fishing and forestry industry, and the food preparation industry – were amongst those least likely to offer workers employer-sponsored insurance. In fact, while 84% of employees in the five least dangerous professions were covered by employer insurance, only 55% of employees in the top five most dangerous professions were.
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The study also notes the discrepancies in income between workers in high-risk industries and those in low-risk fields. Workers who died on the job had an average yearly income of $51,871, compared to a national average income of $56,310. And the majority of the highest-fatality jobs had incomes that came in under the American weekly median.
"Employer-sponsored health insurance is supposed to offer access to affordable health care to Americans of all social and economic classes, even those with a modest income," says ValuePenguin expert Divya Sangameshwar. "However, the reality for many Americans is that they really don't earn enough money to afford health insurance – even heavily subsidized insurance from their employer."
Importantly, not every high-risk industry obeyed the low-insurance tendency. Some 82% of workers in the third highest-injury occupation, health care practitioners, had employer-based insurance, compared to only 36.7% of workers in the highest-injury industry, farming, fishing, and forestry.
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