Workers' compensation: 1978 program update.

Workers' compensation is one of the few State-administered income-maintenance programs operating throughout the United States. The national "system" to provide benefits for work-caused disability and death actually consists of 50 independent State operations and several special Federal programs. The Social Security Administration 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--as well as national estimates on coverage, payroll, and costs to employers--are compiled and analyzed each year. This article includes an historical perspective on the estimates, dating from 1940.