Presumptive disease employment laws facilitate access to health care and compensation for employees who work in hazardous conditions. The scope of these laws is to remove the employee’s responsibility of demonstrating that their condition(s) are caused by their work, thus providing rapid access to resources. On a federal level, the Federal Employees’ Compensation Act (FECA) provides firefighters with these benefits in the event of a disease. In 2025, this Act was expanded to include women’s specific cancers, clarifying conditions for compensation and improving access to care.
However, state-level legislation often lags behind in aligning with federal regulations, as municipalities often seek to preserve their right to dispute such claims. The cost of compensation for a single injured or sick firefighter can reach millions, prompting policymakers to delay implementing these laws in an effort to limit financial responsibility. Nevertheless, these tactics to preserve municipal funds can have rippling effects, whereby firefighters are less likely to pursue this profession, despite other potential benefits.
In the United States, women comprise 9% of the entire firefighting force, totaling more than 90,000 female firefighters. Around 72,400 of these people work voluntarily, a professional firefighting category that is also excluded from presumptive coverage. Moreover, as the number of women firefighters increased in the past decade, the number of volunteers and professional...
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