Workers' Compensation: Mother Jones

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Thursday, December 5, 2013

Meet the 32 Senate Republicans Who Voted to Continue LGBT Discrimination in the Workplace

Today's post was shared by Mother Jones and comes from www.motherjones.com

Louie Palu/ZUMA, Jay Mallin/ZUMA, Jeff Cook/ZUMA, Michael Reynolds/ZUMA and Jane Kelly/Shutterstock
On Thursday afternoon, the Senate passed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a landmark bill that would end decades of employment discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans. The bill moved forward with support of 54 senators who caucus with the Democrats (Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania didn't vote because he was attending to his wife's surgery) as well as votes from 10 Republicans, only a few months after the Supreme Court ruled that the government must recognize same-sex marriages. But most GOP Senators came out against it, and House Speaker John Boehner has promised to oppose the bill, which means it will likely be killed in the House.
"One party in one house of Congress should not stand in the way of millions of Americans who want to go to work each day and simply be judged by the job they do," President Barack Obama said in a statement. "I urge the House Republican leadership to bring this bill to the floor for a vote and send it to my desk so I can sign it into law."
It's already illegal for companies to discriminate against Americans on the basis of age, disability, gender, race and religion. ENDA would add sexual orientation and gender identity to the list, protecting LGBT workers from being fired or denied benefits and promotions based on their sexual identity. (An amendment pushed by Sen. Rob...

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Sunday, November 24, 2013

Obamacare Has a Friend in the Health Care Industry

Today's post was shared by Mother Jones and comes from www.motherjones.com

In the LA Times today, Noam Levey writes that Obamacare has an ace in the hole: the insurance industry. Sure, they have their gripes:

But since 2010, they have invested billions of dollars to overhaul their businesses, design new insurance plans and physician practices and develop better ways to monitor quality and control costs.
Few industry leaders want to go back to a system that most had concluded was failing, as costs skyrocketed and the ranks of the uninsured swelled. Nor do they see much that is promising from the law's Republican critics. The GOP has focused on repealing Obamacare, but has devoted less energy to developing a replacement.
.... For many of these organizations, the prospect of new customers and a more rational system outweighs their sometimes intense irritation with the Obama administration. Insurance executives, in particular, have gnashed their teeth at the president's attacks on their industry....Despite the frustrations, most insurers remain committed to moving to a new market that would achieve the central promise of the Affordable Care Act: that all consumers can buy health plans even if they have preexisting medical conditions.

This is really a crucial point. Like it or not, the entire health care industry has spent the past three years gearing up for the rollout of Obamacare. At this point, they're committed—and doubly so since the Republican Party very clearly has no real alternative for them. This means that all the doom-mongering on Fox...

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Friday, November 22, 2013

Income Growth Has Stalled for Most Americans

Workers' Compensation is basically a system based on wages that determine benefits. Over the decades the spread or "inequality" of wealth has moved more workers into a lower pay class wherein they only receive the minimum rates of workers' compensation benefits despite what appears to be yearly increases in rate structures. Today's post was shared by Mother Jones and comes from www.motherjones.com

Yesterday the Census Bureau released its latest income data, confirming what millions of Americans already know: The recession may be over, but the recovery has yet to trickle down. Specifically, the Census reported that median household incomes didn't budge between 2011 and 2012.

Digging deeper into the new data reveals more evidence of the widening income gap between the rich and the rest.

The only bright side of stalled incomes is that they are no longer experiencing the steep decline that started in 2007 before the recession hit. But that's hardly cause for celebration: At $51,017, the real median household income in 2012 is even less than it was at the end of the '80s, and it's down 9 percent from its high in 1999.

This loss of real income hasn't affected all Americans equally. For the top 20 percent of earners, average incomes grew 70 percent since 1967, and they grew 88 percent for the top 5 percent. Meanwhile, middle-income households have seen their earnings grow just 20 percent in the past four decades.

This translates into a greater share of total income going to top earners. In 2012, the top 20 percent took in more than half of all income in the United States, according to the Census.

To put that into sharper focus, I've charted how each percentile's share of total income has changed since the late '60s. After experiencing significant growth in the mid-1970s, the bottom 20 percent of earners have seen their share steadily drop. Compare that...

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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.

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Saturday, November 16, 2013

Chris Christie's Failure Shows Just How Popular He Is

Today's post was shared by Mother Jones and comes from www.motherjones.com

Former New Jersey governor Tom Kean is apparently pretty annoyed with Chris Christie, partly for personal reasons and partly because Christie failed to help any other Republicans get elected to the state legislature.

The full failure of Christie's "coattails" campaign is only now being known. Christie had wanted to win the state senate, cutting ads and campaigning for key candidates. None of his challengers unseated any Democrats. The total Republican gain in the Assembly appears to be... one. That's better than 2011, when Democrats gained a seat, but even if you factor in the gerrymander that protects Democrats, Kean and other Republicans are amazed that Christie could win by 21 points and carry almost nobody along with him.

OK, but isn't there another way of looking at this? It shows just how popular Christie is personally even in a state that shows no sign whatsoever of warming up to Republicans in general. That's fairly remarkable.
I'll admit this a slatepitchy kind of argument to make, and I don't know if I really even believe it. Weigel is certainly right that this leaves Christie in the unenviable position of having to scrape and compromise with Democrats for the next few years, something that's unlikely to help his presidential ambitions much. If his compromises succeed, he's a sellout. If they fail, he's a guy who can't get anything done. That kind of sucks.
Still! His personal brand is obviously pretty sky high. That has to count for something.

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Sunday, November 3, 2013

Why Texting-While-Driving Bans Don't Work

Today's post was shared by Mother Jones and comes from www.motherjones.com

Lost in the clamor for stricter distracted-driving laws, a study from April 2013 found discouraging patterns in the relationship between texting bans and traffic fatalities.
As one might expect, single occupant vehicle crashes dip noticeably when a state legislature enacts a texting and driving ban. But the change is always short-lived, according to this study, which examined data from every state except Alaska from 2007 through 2010. Within months, the accident rate typically returned to pre-ban levels.
The researchers, Rahi Abouk and Scott Adams of University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, attribute this pattern to the "announcement effect," when drivers adjust their behavior to compensate for a perceived law enforcement threat—only to return to old habits when enforcement appears ineffectual. In other words, drivers might dial back their texting when they hear about a ban, but after they succumb to the urge once or twice and get away with it, they determine it's okay and keep doing it.
"It's different than drunk driving," Adams said. Identifying intoxicated drivers is relatively easy, "you can give somebody a breathalyzer, you can have checkpoints." But with texting, "it's really hard [for policemen] to know" if someone's been texting.
No one denies the dangers of texting while driving. In fact, 95 percent of AAA survey (PDF) respondents said texting behind the wheel was a "very" serious threat to their personal safety. But 35 percent of the same...

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Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Leaked documents reveal the secret finances of a pro-industry science group

As the judicial system is bombarded with evidential scientific research in order to ascertain the truth, the research process itself is subject to being influenced. Today's post is shared from MotherJones.org and describes what happens when so-called "independent research" becomes tainted.

The American Council on Science and Health bills itself as an independent research and advocacy organization devoted to debunking "junk science." It's a controversial outfit—a "group of scientists…concerned that many important public policies related to health and the environment did not have a sound scientific basis," it says—that often does battle with environmentalists and consumer safety advocates, wading into public health debates to defend fracking, to fight New York City's attempt to ban big sugary sodas, and to dismiss concerns about the potential harms of the chemical bisphenol-A (better known at BPA) and the pesticide atrazine.

The group insists that its conclusions are driven purely by science. It acknowledges that it receives some financial support from corporations and industry groups, but ACSH, which reportedly stopped disclosing its corporate donors two decades ago, maintains that these contributions don't influence its work and agenda.

Yet internal financial documents (read them here) provided to Mother Jones show that ACSH depends heavily on funding from corporations that have a financial stake in the scientific debates it aims to shape.

The group also directly solicits donations from these industry sources around specific issues. ACSH's financial links to corporations involved in hot-button health and safety controversies have been highlighted in the past, but these documents offer a more extensive...

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Monday, October 14, 2013

What we know about football and repetitive brain trauma

Today's post was shared by Mother Jones and comes from www.motherjones.com

Brain tissue images, with tau protein in brown. The brain on the left is from a normal subject, the brain in the middle is from a former football player, and the brain on the right is from a former boxer.Courtesy of the Boston University Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy.
League of Denial, a PBS Frontline documentary about the NFL's response (or lack thereof) to concussions and long-term brain injuries among its players, airs tonight. The investigation attempts to hash out what the league really knew about player safety while it downplayed the ill effects the sport has on its athletes. But what exactly are those effects, and what about them made thousands of former players sue the NFL over their injuries?
While the symptoms of a concussion—dizziness, vomiting, memory loss—can be felt immediately, the long-term impacts of repeated brain trauma have been harder to study. Research points to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, as one of the major outcomes. CTE is caused by a buildup of tau, a protein that strangles brain cells and degenerates brain tissue, which is caused by repetitive brain trauma like the hits football players endure. This leads to depression, increased aggression, lack of impulse control, and eventually dementia, which may not manifest until years or even decades after the brain injuries took place. While CTE can only be definitively identified after a patient dies, a pilot study at the University of...

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Saturday, October 5, 2013

Now the Government Shutdown Is Stopping Blood Drives

Today's post was shared by Mother Jones and comes from www.motherjones.com

Here's how the government shutdown may literally be killing people: by causing blood shortages.

For all the scorn heaped on government employees, some people forget that the faceless bureaucrats who populate Washington are often, in fact, a bunch of do-gooders—people who genuinely believe in the notion of public service. As such, they contribute to the public good in a lot of ways that are taken for granted, like their immense contribution to local blood banks. Thirty-eight percent of the population is eligible to give blood, but only 5 percent actually does so. A lot of that 5 percent apparently works for the federal government. Thanks to the shutdown, in just two days, four federal agency blood drives scheduled by one DC-area health care system have been canceled. The regional Red Cross has had to cancel six others in the Washington region.

Inova Blood Donor Services projects that the cancelations will result in its projected loss of 300 donations that would have helped 900 patients in DC, Maryland, and Virginia. Inova's donated blood collections supply 24 hospitals, which bank much of the blood for inevitable disasters or, say, terrorist attacks. The Red Cross is suffering from similar disruptions, projecting the loss of 229 donations, each of which could potentially save up to three lives. A single major trauma event can easily deplete a hospital's entire blood store. The longer the shutdown goes on, the...

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Thursday, October 3, 2013

What Happens When The Government Shuts Down 94 Percent of the EPA

Today's post was shared by Mother Jones and comes from www.motherjones.com

Tuesday morning, 94 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency's 16,000 workers were furloughed due to the government shutdown.

"They basically lock things up, batten things down, which takes a few hours, then a vast majority of people are sent home," says consultant Dina Kruger, who worked at the EPA during the 1996 government shutdown.

To make sense of what it means that over 15,000 EPA employees are now sitting at home instead of working, consider how many facets of the environment the agency has its hands in: The EPA monitors air quality, regulates pesticides and waste, cleans up hazardous chemical spills, and ensures that people have safe drinking water, among other things. Now, according to the plan it laid out for the shutdown, only some workers will be on hand to respond to emergencies and to monitor labs and property.

That means the EPA will temporarily halt cleanup at 507 superfund sites across the country, the agency told the Huffington Post. Sites where the EPA was cleaning up hazardous chemicals are shuttered in any situation where closing them down won't be an immediate threat to the surroundings.

This will slow down cleanups and tack on additional costs that will accrue as these contaminated sites are left to their own devices, says Scott Slesinger, legislative director at the National Resources Defense Council and a former EPA employee. "The only sites that would be exempted would be those that, if they stopped working...

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Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Chart of the Day: Hands-Free Talking Is as Bad as Talking on a Handset. Maybe Even Worse.

Distracted driving doesn't get better by the use of hands free technology. Today's post was shared by Mother Jones and comes from www.motherjones.com

Michael O'Hare points us this morning to a study of cell phone usage in cars that confirms the obvious: it's dangerous. More dangerous than driving drunk, in fact. What's more, as the chart on the right shows, hands-free talking doesn't help. In fact, for certain

tasks it makes things even worse. O'Hare explains what's going on:

To understand the reason, consider driving while (i) listening to the radio as I was (ii) conversing with an adult passenger (iii) transporting a four-year-old (iv) sharing the front seat with a largish dog.
Why are the first two not dangerous, and the last two make you tense up just thinking about them?

The radio is not a person, and you subconsciously know that you may miss something if you attend to something in the road ahead, but also that you won’t insult it if you “listen away”, and it won’t suffer, much less indicate unease. The adult passenger can see out the windshield and also catch very subtle changes in your tone of voice or body language.

If you stop talking to attend to the car braking up ahead, the passenger knows why instantly, and accommodates, and because you know this, you aren’t anxious about interrupting the conversation. The dog and the child, in contrast, are completely unaware of what’s coming up on the road or what you need to pay attention to; the former is happy to jump in your lap if it seems like a good idea at any moment, and the child demands attention on her own schedule and at...

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Saturday, September 21, 2013

Health Care Spending Will Peak Around 2025 and Then Flatten Out

Recent comment to the cost of medical care in for injured workers appear to reflect that it is a "boomer generation" factor. The question is whether the workers' compensation system can wait until 2025 or will it be dead by then as a result of medical costs. Today's post was shared by Mother Jones and comes from www.motherjones.com

This is apropos of nothing. I happened to be fiddling around with CMS health care expenditures and decided to take a look at how spending has increased year-over-year as a share of GDP for the past four decades. (Example: If spending increases from a 16 percent share of GDP to a 16.4 percent share of GDP, that's a year-over-year 2.5 percent growth rate.)

The chart below is a rolling 5-year average to smooth out the noise. Roughly speaking, it shows a steady decrease in the growth rate. If things continue along these lines, health care spending will continue increasing until it reaches about 21-22 percent of GDP sometime in the mid-2020s. The aging of the baby boom generation might send that number a little higher, but not by a lot, I suspect.

The mechanism is simple: As spending goes up, our collective resistance to higher spending increases, and that's the ultimate brake on health care expenditures. I'm willing to bet that U.S. spending on health care will never top 25 percent of GDP. It might not even top 23 percent.

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Democrats Jump on the 'Death Panel' Bandwagon (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)
Law Will Shift Demographics For Medicaid Toward Healthier Group, Study Finds (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)
For Workers Leaving Their Jobs, Health Exchanges Offer Insurance Choices Beyond COBRA (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)
Has the Internet Raised or Lowered Healthcare Costs? (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)
Medical Transparency: Resistance is Futile (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)
What to Do About Futile Critical Care (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)

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Thursday, December 5, 2013

Meet the 32 Senate Republicans Who Voted to Continue LGBT Discrimination in the Workplace

Sunday, November 24, 2013

Obamacare Has a Friend in the Health Care Industry

Friday, November 22, 2013

Income Growth Has Stalled for Most Americans

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Chris Christie's Failure Shows Just How Popular He Is

Sunday, November 3, 2013

Why Texting-While-Driving Bans Don't Work

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Leaked documents reveal the secret finances of a pro-industry science group

Monday, October 14, 2013

What we know about football and repetitive brain trauma

Saturday, October 5, 2013

Now the Government Shutdown Is Stopping Blood Drives

Thursday, October 3, 2013

What Happens When The Government Shuts Down 94 Percent of the EPA

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Chart of the Day: Hands-Free Talking Is as Bad as Talking on a Handset. Maybe Even Worse.

Saturday, September 21, 2013

Health Care Spending Will Peak Around 2025 and Then Flatten Out

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Thursday, December 5, 2013

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