Workers' compensation: coverage, benefits, and costs, 1987.

Workers’ compensation is one of the few State-administered income-maintenance programs operating throughout the United States. The national “system” that provides medical care and income-maintenance protection to workers disabled from workrelated injuries or illnesses actually consists of 50 independent State operations and several special Federal programs. The Social Security Administration (SSA) developed and continues to improve basic statistics to measure trends and progress in workers’ compensation and to evaluate the program, especially in relation to income-maintenance programs under the Social Security Act. A standardized set of State and national estimates of amounts expended for workers’ compensation benefits-including national estimates on coverage, payroll, and costs to employers-has been compiled and analyzed each year by SSA since 1942. These annual data are gathered from government and nongovernment sources and are aggregated at the national level to provide a comprehensive picture of the scope of these programs.