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Showing posts with label economic competition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economic competition. Show all posts

Thursday, February 28, 2013

California, Workers' Compensation and The Nuclear Option


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.