CMS Posts WCMSA Self-Administration Guidance

A new WCMSA Self-Administration page has been added to the Workers Compensation Medicare Set-Aside Arrangement section of CMS.gov. The new page contains information for individuals who choose to self-administer their WCMSA accounts. Materials available on the new page include:

• New Self-Administration Toolkit for WCMSAs 
• Account Expenditure for Lump Sum Account (Attestation Letter)
• Account Expenditure for Structured Annuity (Attestation Letter)
• Transaction Record Sample
• WCMSA Reference Guide

The following link may be used to access the page http://go.cms.gov/WCMSASelfAdm.

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CMS Announces New WCMSA Re-Evaluation Procedure

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Effective immediately, if a WCMSA proposal amount was originally submitted via the web-portal, a re-evaluation of an approved WCMSA amount can be requested through the WCMSA web portal, if the claimant or submitter ...

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Annual Reporting of WCMSA Account Expenditures

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Executive Pay: Invasion of the Supersalaries

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.nytimes.com

Browse the proxy statements of the nation’s largest corporations and you’ll find the instruction manuals for this apparatus explaining how to finely calibrate the pay of top executives with company performance. The Coca-Cola board, for example, lays out the formula that set the 2013 cash bonus for Muhtar Kent, its chief executive (base salary x base salary factor x business performance factor). It explains how a failure to achieve certain goals helped limit the bonus to $2 million, but also describes how Mr. Kent got millions more in stock and options. It notes that under his leadership, Coke had “continued to gain value share globally in nonalcoholic ready-to-drink beverages,” and tells shareholders why the board might require him to fly on the company jet (“to allow travel time to be used productively for the Company”). What was all that worth? A tidy $18 million. But putting aside whether those particular metrics for aligning pay with performance make sense (or, rather, turning over that discussion to Gretchen Morgenson in her Fair Game column), the elegant machine itself would seem to have a dark side. Some say, in fact, that it is the main engine of inequality in America today. The current system of executive compensation, with its emphasis on performance, can theoretically constrain pay, but in practice it has not stopped companies...

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In France, a Move to Limit Off-the-Clock Work Emails

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.nytimes.com "On-Call Status" and responding to off-hours electronic communication will expend the coverage of workers' compensation will otherwise expand to a 24/7 insurance policy.

PARIS — Given France’s 35-hour workweek, generous vacations and persistent, if not altogether accurate, reputation for indolence, it may come as a surprise that the French are only now considering limits on the work emails and phone calls that come at all hours of the day and night. Labor unions and corporate representatives in France have agreed on an “obligation to disconnect from remote communications tools” that would apply to 250,000 employees of consulting, computing and polling firms. The accord, signed this month but yet to be approved by the Labor Ministry, would require that employers verify that the 11 hours of daily “rest” time to which all workers are legally entitled be spent uninterrupted. “We really want there to be 11 consecutive hours,” said Marie Buard, a project leader at the Federation of Communication, Consulting and Culture, a branch of the French Democratic Confederation of Labor. Still, Ms. Buard said, “We also wouldn’t like this to squeeze businesses and cause them problems.” Under the agreement, she said, each company would develop a policy and enforcement mechanisms. One might choose to block communications from 11 p.m. to 10 a.m. by shutting down its email servers, while another might simply ask employees not to check email between 9 p.m. and 8 a.m. Similar limits have been tested elsewhere. In 2011, Volkswagen started shutting off its BlackBerry servers at the end of the workday,...

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Citing armed protesters, BLM returns seized cattle to Nevada rancher

Today's post about "worker safety" is shared from the LA Times. After spending a week whisking away nearly 400 cattle they said were illegally grazing on federal land in the Nevada desert, officials facing a battalion of protesters with horses and guns decided to free those cattle in a stunning reversal Saturday afternoon. A line of cattle calmly filtered out of a federal holding area at about 3 p.m. as protesters and law enforcement watched from alongside Interstate 15 near the Nevada-Arizona state line. "Due to escalating tensions, the cattle have been released from the enclosures in order to avoid violence and help restore order," the U.S. Bureau of Land Management said in a short statement. Federal officials have failed for 21 years to compel rancher Cliven Bundy to pay the fee required to let privately owned cattle use public land. The government has said the cattle roundup was a “last resort” to enforce court orders ruling that Bundy had failed to pay more than $1 million in fees since 1993. Forcing him either to pay or to give up his cattle is a matter of fairness to the 16,000 ranchers who do follow the rules, U.S. officials said. Two weeks ago, the BLM and the National Park Service began mobilizing helicopters, trucks, cowboys and rangers to seize Bundy’s 900 cattle.  The agencies moved nearly 400 to the holding area before suddenly announcing Saturday morning that the operation would end because of "grave concerns" about worker safety. Bundy received nationwide support from people frustrated by...

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Bucket truck tips over in Cape Cod, Mass., killing 2 NStar utility contractors

Authorities work on the scene of a fatal accident where two workers died in Bourne, Mass., Saturday, April 12, 2014. Their bucket truck apparently tipped over while they were in the basket more than 100 feet in the air at a Cape Cod site. (AP Photo/Cape Cod Times, Steve Heaslip) BOURNE, Mass. -- Two Massachusetts workers are dead after their bucket truck tipped over Saturday while they were in the basket more than 100 feet in the air at a Cape Cod site. Bourne police confirmed the Saturday deaths at Cape Cod Aggregates Corp. near Scenic Highway. They didn't release the men's names. The men were working for a contractor for an NStar utility project, They appeared to be working underneath high tension power lines, near utility poles, on sandy barren land. The two men were both in the bucket when the truck toppled over, Police Chief Dennis Woodside told the newspaper. He said they were killed instantly. The Office of Occupational Safety and Health Administration is investigating. OSHA didn't immediately return a call for comment.

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Nebraska Supreme Court: Workers' comp includes PTSD, drug treatment after store shooting

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Too Big To Pay For: Workers' Compensation's Struggle To Cover Medical Care

Today's post was shared by WorkCompCentral and comes from daviddepaolo.blogspot.com. It highlights the growing concerns about infectious disease and burden it adds to an incredibly bogged down workers' compensation program. Ironically a recent report today in the NEJM (advanced publication) concerning a potential, but very expensive cure for Hep C (Therapy for Hepatitis C — The Costs of Success, Jay H. Hoofnagle, M.D., and Averell H. Sherker, M.D., April 12, 2014DOI: 10.1056/NEJMe1401508), mirrors this issue on an ever increasing trend. The question continues to arise as to whether the delivery of medical care is just too big and complicated of an issue for the aged workers' compensation system to handle any longer. JL Gelman

Political machinations create the complexity we know as workers' compensation law. California is the prime example, with several bills moving around the legislature that bestow special treatment to certain classes of workers. One bill, Assembly Bill 1035 by House Speaker John A. Pérez, D-Los Angeles, would allow dependents to file claims for deaths caused by cancer, tuberculosis, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections and other bloodborne infectious diseases up to 420 weeks from the date the disease is diagnosed. Similar bills in the past had made it through the legislature but Gov. Jerry Brown had vetoed them ostensibly because he was waiting for reports from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and the California Commission on Health Safety and Workers' Compensation. AB 1373, which passed in 2013 and AB 2451, which passed in 2012 differed in that both extended the limitations period to 480 weeks. And the new bill includes a sunset provision that would allow the governor and Legislature to revisit the appropriateness of the new time frame in five years. Supporters say AB 1035 is necessary because with advances in medical science, safety officers who develop cancer and other diseases through their employment are living longer. The emotional appeal is that these brave public servants fight for their lives, only to succumb to the disease after the death benefits limitation period expires so dependents can not collect the benefits. Of...

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