| Cost shifting remains a major factor in the degradation of the the nation's workers' compensation system. Today's post authored by David Depaolo focusses upon this issue and is shared from http://daviddepaolo.blogspot.com/ The Labor Day holiday weekend gave me a couple extra days to think and write - excuse the length of this entry.
Several said I need to stop picking on the insurance companies and claims administrators, some wanted to know more information about who, what and when, presumably for some legal attention. One person even said they were going to cancel their WorkCompCentral subscription because I was being too hard on insurance companies. And some said I was being too soft - that quite simply the insurance or third party administrator folks are just capitalists doing their jobs maximizing profits for shareholders so they're not to blame; and they're also not to be relied upon for corrective leadership either. "You can stop bitching at the professionals that participate in the System to ‘do better,'" I was told. "They are all Capitalist and their job is to maximize their profits. It is the job of the government to regulate what is ‘fair and reasonable’." On the heels of that, another insurance professional contacted me to point out that a big travesty of the workers' compensation system is how the law permits the shifting of system liabilities on to greater tax payer funded systems. In California, for instance, there is a capitation on the maximum amount of temporary total disability time - in general it is 104 weeks (unless... |
