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Showing posts with label IMR. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IMR. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 17, 2016

The State of Medical Care in California’s Workers’ Compensation System

Katherine Roe

Todays' guest post is authored by Katie Roe*  of the California Bar and was originally published at rivercityattorneys.com/blog (Fraulob & Brown).

When you’re injured at work, you expect that your employer’s insurance carrier will dutifully provide you with proper medical treatment for your injury. After all, future medical care is one of the “benefits” injured workers are entitled to in California. Denial of medical treatment is the number one frustration we hear from our clients on a daily basis.

What injured workers quickly discover is that their medical treatment is strictly controlled by the insurance carrier and their medical fate is in the hands of a doctor who has never treated them and may not even have their complete medical records. This process is called Utilization Review (UR). Under UR an outside physician gets to decide whether or not the insurance company should authorize the medical treatment prescribed by your primary treating physician. This doctor doesn’t even have to be licensed in California.

If the medical treatment prescribed by your physician is denied, your only recourse is to appeal the decision to an Independent Medical Reviewed (IMR). In California, MAXIMUS is the company contracted to conduct IMR reviews. Like UR doctors, the IMR doctor deciding your fate, has never met you or treated you and does not need to be licensed in California. In fact, their identity is protected. If your medical treatment is denied by UR, your chances of IMR overturning the decision are not good. California Workers’ Compensation Institute, an insurance research group, found that 91% of IMR decisions uphold the UR denial. If the treatment is denied by IMR, absent a change in circumstances, the denial will be in effect for one year.

While an injured worker has the right to appeal an IMR determination to the Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board, the only legal bases on which to appeal are fraud, conflict of interest, or mistake of fact. However, even if your appeal is successful the WCAB still cannot overturn the IMR doctor’s decision. If an appeal is granted, the remedy is referral to a different IMR for another review. Yes, you read that right, your award is to go through the IMR process again!

Many injured workers end up seeking treatment for their work related injuries through private insurance, Medicare or Medi-Cal. A study by J. Paul Leigh, a health economist at the University of California, Davis, estimated that only 1/3 of necessary medical treatment and lost wages is being paid for by workers’ compensation insurers.

The lack of adequate medical care for injured workers today is the result of Senate Bill 863, which was passed on August 1, 2012 and signed into law by Governor Brown on September 18, 2012. This law was the result of lobbying by big businesses and insurance companies, who have influence over the State Legislature and the Governor of California. We remind our clients that you also have a political voice. We recommend you go to Voters Injured at Work (www.viaw.org) for information on how to become involved with fixing this broken system.

To read more about the dismal state of medical treatment for injured workers all over America I encourage you to read Insult to Injury by Michael Grabell athttps://www.propublica.org/article/the-demolition-of-workers-compensation.

*Katherine Roe is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area. She attended University of St. Thomas, Saint Paul Minnesota for her undergraduate degree in Sociology with a minor in Criminal Justice. She earned her Master in Public Administration from University of Notre Dame de Namur, Belmont, CA. Katie graduated from University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento where she received the Witkin Award for Health Law and Elder Law Clinic. She is a practicing attorney in the areas of Workers’ Compensation Law, Social Security Disability and Elder Law, including estate planning with wills, trusts, deeds, powers of attorney and health care directives.
While in college, Katie tutored grade school and high school students in low-income neighborhoods in Saint Paul and Minneapolis, MN and interned with the Oakdale, MN Police Department.
During law school, Katie interned with Legal Aid Society of San Mateo County, Human Rights Fair Housing Commission and the California Department of Insurance. While at McGeorge, she worked in the Elder and Health Law Clinic where she handled Medicare appeals, elder abuse cases, restraining orders, wills, trusts, consumer protection, special needs trusts, and powers of attorney.
While the Clinical Fellow at McGeorge she received the Cohn Sisters’ Scholarship for Patient Advocacy.

Saturday, June 14, 2014

Troubled


Historically California with its huge share of the nation's workers' compensaton market defines the future course of regulation and reform. The analysis offered by David DePaolo is indeed troubling. Today's post is shared from http://daviddepaolo.blogspot.com

The message I heard at the California Workers' Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau's Annual Meeting yesterday in San Francisco was a mixed one, but my ultimate conclusion isn't positive.

The bottom line - frictional costs associated with the most recent reform effort seem to have introduced more frictional costs than savings, and the likelihood is that when Oregon does it's rate normalized bi-annual survey, California may just come out on top as the most expensive state with a troublesome delivery history and questionable profitability for carriers.

Ugh...

Here's a sort of good news, bad news synopsis, not necessarily in any particular order:

While there has been a dramatic reduction in claim frequency (fancy insurance-speak for the number of injuries per given period), down some 80% over the past 40 years, California has seen frequency level off and even grow a small percentage where the rest of the nation continues to experience continuing declines. It seems that this frequency deviation is attributable to the Greater Los Angeles area - a geographic bubble driving the state's negative claims picture.

It seems that the frequency trend in indemnity claims in the LA area is attributable to continuous trauma...

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Friday, December 20, 2013

A California Lesson: How to Kill Workers' Compensation Pill By Pill

Back in the days when the workers’ compensation statutes were initially crafted in the US, probably the most common drugs used to treat injured workers were aspirin and Mercurochrome ™ (a/k/a Merbromin, now banned by the FDA). Things were sure simpler then.

Now workers comp pharmaceutical sales is a big business: The drug companies hire sales reps on commission to sell products to doctor; doctors are paid by the drug companies with gifts, trips and free lunches; and pharmacies and a new cottage industry of pharmacy benefit coordinators will even help injured workers “find an attorney.”

Mercurochrome™
Compounding (no pun intended) is yet another problem as specialty drugs are crafted to prescribing physician specifications. Recently that has led to a major contamination issue as governmental regulations were lacking.

If things weren’t bad enough in the pharmaceutical sector, there is also an element of both prescription fraud and abuse. Sometimes even the dispenser will attempt to also cut costs by selling a generic, almost but not quite, look alike product as a substitute.

The breakfast table discussion topic in injured workers’ homes concentrates on boasting, “how many pills do you take?” It is not if, it is now how much.

Understandably, California employers and insurance carriers are grabbing the opportunity of using the IMR (Independent Medical Review) process to delay and deny benefits. The problem is that is NOT what the process was intended to be used for. It you want to kill the workers’ compensation system using, the pill by pill technique, the strategy will obviously work.

It is bad medicine for an ill system. It will only increase costs and litigation  and all the parties will suffer.

While some very knowledgeable people have endorsed a “formulary system,” that is a doubtful solution to the complicated issue. The Part D system embraced under the Medicare Program is a nightmare of confusion. You need a crystal ball, and a lot of luck, on picking the best selection. The odds at the Mega-Million jackpot are better.


What workers’ compensation needs is not to re-invent the wheel yet again for  pharmaceutical care. It cannot cure the corrupted practices of big pharma. The compensation system was intended to be a simple and cost effective system for providing summary benefits for injured workers. California needs to take a step back, and just specifically exclude drugs from the IMR process altogether.
….
Jon L. Gelman of Wayne NJ is the author NJ Workers’ Compensation Law (West-Thompson) and co-author of the national treatise, Modern Workers’ Compensation Law (West-Thompson). For over 4 decades the Law Offices of Jon L Gelman  1.973.696.7900  jon@gelmans.com  have been representing injured workers and their families who have suffered occupational accidents and illnesses.

Thursday, October 10, 2013

California Workers' Compensation Reform: Is The System in a Ditch Now?

California is the sentinel jurisdiction for innovative decisional law, theory and statutory changes in workers' compensation. As goes California, so goes the nation. The changes to limit access are coming so quickly that perennial reform has become almost weekly now. The complexity is almost scary. Recent proposed modifications in the Independent Medical Review (IMR) process reflect what happens when statutory changes are not first vented with those who are major stakeholders, ie. injured workers and their representative. Commentary and analysis, continue to be kicked down the road as the system stalls and fails. Today's blog post is shared from http://blogs.sacbee.com.
Last year, the California Legislature -- with the blessing of Gov. Jerry Brown -- enacted its traditional, once-a-decade overhaul of the state's multibillion-dollar-a-year system of compensating workers for job-related injuries and illnesses.


Employers, insurers, medical care providers and other players in the workers' compensation system are still sorting through what the Legislature and Brown wrought. Generally, the overhaul,
Senate Bill 863, raised some cash benefits but also tightened up eligibility for, or even eliminated, other benefits. This earned rare joint support from employer groups and labor unions, which had worked on the changes privately.

JD_COMP_STRETCHER.JPGA new 16-state study of workers' compensation systems, covering 60 percent of the nation's workers, says it's too early to tell what the real-world effects of SB 863 will be, specifically whether its cost-saving provisions will offset the costs of increased cash payments, as its sponsors promised.

Because the effects of the 2012 overhaul are still unknown, the study from the Workers Compensation Research Institute in Cambridge, Mass., concentrated its section on California on how it compared to other states during the years following the previous overhaul in 2004.

It found that disabled California workers were receiving permanent partial disability payments more often than those in other major states and that those payments tended to be longer in duration -- thus confirming one of employers' complaints,...
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