States have been moving further away from the National Commission on State Workers’ Compensation recommendations to better serve injured workers, panelists said Monday at a Department of Labor event in Washington commemorating the 50th anniversary of the commission’s landmark report.
The panelists said there was a period of about two decades after the report was released in which most states made improvements. But the momentum stopped, and many states have taken to cutting costs by restricting which injuries are compensable, they said.
The immediate impact of the report was for state lawmakers to increase the cap on benefits to equal the state’s average weekly wage and extend the duration of partial disability benefits, said Alan Pierce, a workers compensation attorney with Pierce, Pierce & Napolitano in Salem, Massachusetts and former president of the Workers’ Injury Law & Advocacy Group.
The net effect in Massachusetts and most of the country, Mr. Pierce said, was that the ability of injured workers to quickly and efficiently receive adequate benefits increased substantially.
However, he said it’s often the case that when a benefit goes up, something else is taken away.
The reforms were followed by what he called “the deform of workers comp.” Employers and insurers in the early 1990s were facing rising costs, he said, and some changes were needed, as insurers were leaving Massachusetts or refusing to write comp coverage.
He said the easy way to fix rising costs is to cut benefits, which is what lawmakers did. In some states, temporary total disability duration was cut to three years from five; benefits were reduced to 60% of a worker’s wages from 66.67%; and the work injury was required to be the major cause for proving a case when the worker has an underlying condition.
“I would have liked to have seen a scalpel,” Mr. Pierce said. “I think we saw a machete, frankly.”
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