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All right, we will start with short-term disability. So the most common question we get usually is well, if the state program allocates 20 weeks of paid medical leave a year for an employee, why do we still need a short-term disability plan? Well, there are lots of reasons, right, if we had more time today. The big one is what we're illustrating here on this slide. There's an income replacement gap under the state program.

And so we talked about this a little bit earlier when we were talking about the benefit calculation in percentage. So if you look at the x-axis down here, that plots out an employee's salary. Then the y-axis plots out the percentage of their income that's replaced under the Massachusetts program based on that benefit calculation that we talked about. So you'll see, if you look at that green mountain over on the left, those lower wage earners, as we talked about, are getting up to 80% of their income replaced.

And then as you start to slope down, or as you go up in salary, they're getting less of that income percentage replaced. So right when you get around the $75,000 to $80,000 range, you're actually dipping under a 60% income replacement under the state program. Or in other words, you're dipping under what you would get if you had at typical STD plan in place. So you can see all of the people that fall into that blue area, if they don't have an STD plan in place, they're going to be getting less under the state program. So they're going to be getting 50%, 40%, 30%, in some cases, even 20% of their salary replaced if they rely on the state paid family medical leave payment alone.

So if you have an STD plan in place, you plug that gap and you keep all of your employees, no matter what they make for a salary, keep them at that 60% income replacement-- or whatever percent income replacement you have in your policy, but typically 60%. You keep them at that percentage, no matter what. So an STD payment will offset the state payment. And we'll talk about that as well. But then we'll pay the difference.

So you're going to get them at least back to that 60% of what they're accustomed to during a period of leave.

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