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(c) 2010-2024 Jon L Gelman, All Rights Reserved.
Showing posts with label Injured Workers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Injured Workers. Show all posts

Saturday, October 14, 2017

2018 Social Security Changes - COLA Increases

The Social Security Administration has announced based on the increase in the Consumer Price Index (CPI-W) from the third quarter of 2016 through the third quarter of 2017, Social Security and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) beneficiaries will receive a 2.0 percent COLA for 2018.

Monday, July 3, 2017

Opioid Litigation and Workers' Compensation

The newly initiated litigation by public entities against Big Pharma may prove to be a huge boost to the workers' compensation system. The lawsuits have the potential curtailing a massive drain of benefit dollars and may provide for subrogation as a result of the nations' opioid epidemic.

Friday, October 7, 2016

US Department of Labor Urges Major Changes in the Nation's Workers' Compensation System

As The Path to Federalization of the US workers' compensation system broadens, the US Department of Labor has published a report urging expansion of the Federal role in reforming the entire patchwork of state systems. As the Presidential Election Cycle moves ahead, the ultimate outcome will impact the the nation's struggling workers' compensation scheme. Based on historical statements both "Hillarycare" or "Trump Medical," (lead by his advisor, Former Speaker Newt Gingrich,  will focus on this issue. See  my prior blog posts below.

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Wage Theft -- Another Assault on Workers' Compensation

As corporate American devises new methods to reduce wages it also assaults the injured workers' benefit safety net including workers' compensation insurance. It results in rate benefits to go down and premium bases to become inadequate to pay on gong claims. Today's post is shared from nytimes.com and is authored by it's Editorial Board.

When labor advocates and law enforcement officials talk about wage theft, they are usually referring to situations in which low-wage service-sector employees are forced to work off the clock, paid sub minimum wages, cheated out of overtime pay or denied their tips. It is a huge and under policed problem. It is also, it turns out, not confined to low-wage workers.

In the days ahead, a settlement is expected in the antitrust lawsuit pitting 64,613 software engineers against Google, Apple, Intel and Adobe. The engineers say they lost up to $3 billion in wages from 2005-9, when the companies colluded in a scheme not to solicit one another’s employees. The collusion, according to the engineers, kept their pay lower than it would have been had the companies actually competed for talent.

The suit, brought after the Justice Department investigated the anti-recruiting scheme in 2010, has many riveting aspects, including emails and other documents that tarnish the reputation of Silicon Valley as competitive and of technology executives as a new breed of “don’t-be-evil” bosses, to cite Google’s informal motto.

The case...

[Click here to see the rest of this post]


Workers' Compensation: Would Higher Minimum Wage for ...
Apr 17, 2014
Wages determine rates of workers' compensation. The lowest wage earners go unnoticed in the struggle to increase benefits. Today's post is shared from njspotlight.com . Advocates decry current $2.13 per hour as unfair, ...
http://workers-compensation.blogspot.com/

Payroll Data Shows a Lag in Wages, Not Just Hiring
Feb 11, 2014
But the report also made plain what many Americans feel in their bones: Wages are stuck, and barely rose at all in 2013. They were up 1.9 percent last year, or a mere 0.4 percent after accounting for inflation. Not only was that ...
http://workers-compensation.blogspot.com/


McDonald's Accused of Stealing Wages From Already ...
Mar 16, 2014
McDonald's Accused of Stealing Wages From Already Underpaid Workers. Wage are the basic factor upon which to calculate rates for workers' compensation purposes. Today's post was shared by Mother Jones and comes ...
http://workers-compensation.blogspot.com/

Friday, June 7, 2013

Workers are too scared in the US to file claims

A recent research report indicated that workers fail to report occupational illness and accidents for fear of retribution by their employers. Most state laws prohibition retaliation by employers, but it is very difficult to enforce that aspect of workers' compensation statutes.

 2013 May 13. doi: 10.1111/1475-6773.12066. [Epub ahead of print]

The Proportion of Work-Related Emergency Department Visits Not Expected to Be Paid by Workers' Compensation: Implications for Occupational Health Surveillance, Research, Policy, and Health Equity.

Source

National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Cincinnati, OH.

Abstract

OBJECTIVE:

To examine trends in the proportion of work-related emergency department visits not expected to be paid by workers' compensation during 2003-2006, and to identify demographic and clinical correlates of such visits.

DATA SOURCE:

A total of 3,881 work-related emergency department visit records drawn from the 2003-2006 National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Surveys.

STUDY DESIGN:

Secondary, cross-sectional analyses of work-related emergency department visit data were performed. Odds ratios and 95 percent confidence intervals were modeled using logistic regression.

PRINCIPAL FINDINGS:

A substantial and increasing proportion of work-related emergency department visits in the United States were not expected to be paid by workers' compensation. Private insurance, Medicaid, Medicare, and workers themselves were expected to pay for 40 percent of the work-related emergency department visits with this percentage increasing annually. Work-related visits by blacks, in the South, to for-profit hospitals and for work-related illnesses were all more likely not to be paid by workers' compensation.

CONCLUSIONS:

Emergency department-based surveillance and research that determine work-relatedness on the basis of expected payment by workers' compensation systematically underestimate the occurrence of occupational illness and injury. This has important methodological and policy implications.
© Health Research and Educational Trust.
PMID:
 
23662682
 
[PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

Thursday, May 16, 2013

The Scarlet Letter - Workers' Compensation Style

Privacy, that was thought to be a paramount concern for individuals in workers' compensation, is now going away in Missouri. The Missouri legislature passed legislation that will allow employers to review the pending claim status of prospective employees to determine whether they have filed any workers' compensation claims. Injured workers in Missouri will now be stigmatized as a result of filing a workers' compensation claim.

"The division shall develop and maintain a workers' compensation claims database, accessible to potential employers through the division's website, containing all claims filed for compensation under this chapter. Claims records shall be retrievable only by an employer who during a pre-hire period provides a potential employee's name and social security number and shall, upon retrieval, identify the date of any claim made by such potential employee and whether the claim is open or closed."

To view the enacted bill SB34 go to www.moga.mo.gov