insurance is the term most frequently applied to the various institutions and plans provided, more or less under the regulation of law, for the protection of the lower-paid workers in most modern countries.  The terms industrial insurance and workingmen’s insurance are likewise used.  The principal types of events for which social insurance in its various branches provides, are (1) accident, (2) sickness, (3) incapacitation (either by old age or by invalidity, that is, permanent failure of health within the normal working years), (4) death (generally called “life” or “survivor” insurance), and (5) unemployment.

The direct aim of social insurance is not to prevent these mishaps (tho that may be an indirect result), but it is to provide some financial indemnity for the economic loss and expense involved in the mishap.  The principal kinds of losses are two.  First, that occasioned directly in caring for the sick or injured person, the expense of medical attention, nursing, hospital care, drugs and special apparatus such as crutches and glasses, and burial expenses.  The second is the loss of income because of inability to work as a result of injury, of illness, or of permanent disability, or (in the case of life insurance) of the death of the bread-winner, or of want of employment.

Sec. 2. #Increasing need of social insurance.# In various connections we have observed how the changes that have been occurring in modern times have increased the uncertainties of the industrial life and of the earning power of the mass of the workers.[1] It should be further observed that in city conditions, a working family does not have, as in agricultural conditions, the supplementary sources of income from garden, field, forest, and stream, and it is not so possible to use the earning power of children, of old people, and of the partially disabled.  The faster working pace of factories, the rapid fluctuations of employment with changing fashions, inventions, shifts of population, and waves of industrial prosperity and depression, all have introduced new risks and problems into the worker’s life.  The increasing payment of wages in money, and the more temporary nature of employment of men in many kinds of factory work, have added to the problem.  With these changes have come a growing interest in the welfare of the mass of the workers and a growing sense of responsibility on the part of the public.

There is an appalling mass of misfortune in the United States requiring social insurance for its relief, altho satisfactory statistics of the various types of misfortune are still lacking.  On the basis of the experience of private industrial insurance companies it appears that there are not less than 25.000 fatal industrial accidents yearly, and 700,000 injuries causing disability for more than four weeks, to say nothing of the enormous number of slight injuries—­if injuries, many of them very painful, disabling for a period from one day to four weeks, should be called slight.  As to loss of time due to illness, the experience of Germany shows an average of eight or nine days a year per worker, which figure, applied to those gainfully employed in America, would mean nearly 300,000,000 days of illness, or 1,000,000 one-man working years, causing a loss estimated to be $750,000,000 annually.