There has been a call among eminent commentators
in California to invoke “The Nuclear Option,” abolishment of the Workers’
Compensation Act entirely. The
suggestion was aired in response to proposed legislation (AB
1309) that would implement a statutory limitation on extraterritorial
coverage for professional athletes and reflects a trend to emasculate the
benefit program by incremental “take backs.”
An analysis demonstrates that the law, proposed by
California Insurance Committee Chairman Henry
Peres (D-Fresno), may indeed be the triggering mechanism to implode the
entire system both in California and in the Nation. It may very well be the
sentinel event.
California has had a logarithmically problematic workers’
compensation program for at least the past 3 decades. It has been literally a
political football. The promise to provide a simple, economically conservative
and expeditious administrative system of benefits has turned into an outright
nightmare. Both labor and Industry have tried, to no avail, to meet those noble
goals against a tide of crippling economic downturn, new and costly medical
modalities, waves of emerging occupational diseases, and an onslaught of
outside vendors who are “eating the lunch” of the system.
