Read at the annual meeting of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland at Baltimore, Apr. 25, 1917.
2.
The American Association for Labor legislation in 1911 estimated that the American wage earner loses on an average 8.5 days per year on account of sickness. The Federal Commission on Industrial Relations, in its staff report estimated from such records as were then available that the average loss of time from disabling sickness and nonindustrial accidents was about 9 days per year per wage earner. The Social Insurance Commission of California in 1917 from a study of the records of American Benefit Association that were collected by the Federal Bureau of Labor a number of years previous and of such data as were available from similar records in California, estimated that the average loss of time per year per person was 6.5 days.
3.
See Twenty-Fourth Annual Report of the United States Commissioner of Labor, vol. 1 pp. 1281–1341.
4.
For a discussion of the sickness rate among persons of different family in the population censused see Public Health Reports for November 22, 1918. Sup.cit.
5.
It may be noted that the members of the 20 associations were nearly all males, the females constituting a negligible proportion, and, so far as could be ascertained, were adults of the usual wage-earning age period. They were employed in a variety of industrial plants and in various occupations; their sickness experience, however, is not large enough to permit of accurate indications of the influence of occupation. Since industrial accidents are not included, and since the members are fairly well distributed among different occupations in the groups presented in the table which follows, the occupational factor may be disregarded for the purposes of this illustration. To a considerable extent the members are a selected group; some of the associations require applicants for membership to pass a physical examination and to be under 45 years of age, and nearly all had provisions which operated to exclude casual laborers from their membership. The possible influence, of administrative methods and practices upon the sick rate is more difficult to determine; the possible effect of the amount of the cash benefit, however, may be disregarded for purposes of approximation, since, for the most part, the. cash benefits provided ranged between one-third and one-half of the wages.
6.
Years of exposure of membership were ascertained from the records of (the associations by securing average memberships for each month in each year and computing the average yearly membership by dividing the total of the monthly membership by 12.
7.
If the average annual case rate of 477 per 1,000 for the entire group of 22 associations included in the foregoing table be used as possibly a more accurate base, the days of sickness per member per year for the associations with a benefit period of 24 to 26 weeks would be 7.3.
