Nobody plans to or wants to make a worker's comp claim. Lots of people specifically plan to and want to make a "maternity leave insurance claim". Lots of other

Nobody plans to or wants to make a worker's comp claim. Lots of people specifically plan to and want to make a "maternity leave insurance claim". Lots of other people are extremely unlikely to do so. And, of course, about half of my coworkers would only be eligible for the paternity leave variant. The chances are fairly low that my 64yo small business owner will be making a claim. They're quite high for my 27yo purchasing agent who just got a house with her husband, which they'd wanted to do before starting a family. The key difference is that employers ought not discriminate between these groups. Workers comp strikes everyone equally and unpredictability, which works great with actuarial models, but you ought not just not hire married 20-40 year old women to drastically reduce your likelihood of a maternity leave expense...or worse, fire them about 6 months before they're expected to make a claim. Health insurance has the same problem, as a 33yo with an 18-minute 5k and zero preexisting conditions, I'm unlikely to need much - especially if I don't skip my "annual" physical for the 3rd year in a row, but my smoking, obese, arthritic 59-year-old machinist has a serious doctor's appointment like every two weeks. How do you run such a service both morally and profitably? At every turn there's an opportunity to sacrifice one for the other.