Workers' Compensation

Monday, September 16, 2013

State files charges against city business

Employer fraud results in criminal charges.Today's post was shared by WCBlog and comes from citizensvoice.com

The state Department of Labor & Industry on Friday filed criminal charges against a Wilkes-Barre business, alleging it failed to maintain worker's compensation insurance.
Kus Tire Inc. at 10 Carey Ave. is charged with 100 felony counts of failing to procure worker's compensation insurance, court records say.

A message left seeking comment at Kus Tire was not immediately returned.

According to a criminal complaint, the business, headed by Bernard Kusakavitch, failed to have the insurance for 100 days - from Sept. 10, 2008, through Sept. 17, 2008, and again from Oct. 1, 2011, through Dec. 31, 2011.

As a self-insured employer, the business was not exempt from possessing the coverage, the charges say.

The complaint said an employee, Walter Booth Jr., was injured Sept. 12, 2008, and subsequently petitioned for benefits from the Uninsured Employers Guaranty Fund, which provides benefits to injured employees of uninsured employers.

According to the complaint, Workers' Compensation Judge Joseph B. Sebastianelli awarded Booth benefits on May 31, 2011.

Investigators filed a summons against the business Friday. The matter is scheduled for a preliminary hearing before Magisterial District Judge Rick Cronauer at 9 a.m. Oct. 31.
jhalpin@citizensvoice.com

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Tembow

Legislators consider workers’ comp changes

Wisconsin Republicans look toward limiting workers' compensation benefits.Today's post was shared by WCBlog and comes from lacrossetribune.com

Wisconsin surgeons performing the same arthroscopic knee surgery on two groups of patients in recent years collected on average $1,573 from one group and $3,728 from the other.

The difference? The lower amount came from those with a group health insurance policy, while the higher amount came from those injured on the job and covered under the state’s workers’ compensation system.

The price discrepancy, reported in a recent study of medical payments in Wisconsin, is fueling discussion about the cost to businesses of workers’ comp insurance. In an unusual move, several Republican lawmakers are considering changes to the system.

Wisconsin’s workers’ compensation system is considered one of the best in the country. Injured workers can access quality health care and return to work quickly, keeping costs low.

The average duration of workers’ comp benefits is 60 days, the shortest of all the states and half the national average, according to recently published data from the National Council on Compensation Insurance.

Typically the state’s Workers’ Compensation Advisory Council, with representation from management and labor, sets workers’ comp policy by bargaining changes and recommending bills to the Legislature. Lawmakers often adopt the proposals without changes in order to insulate the system from political swings in leadership
But Republican legislators led by Rep. Dan Knodl, R-Germantown, are reviewing of the issue as part of...

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Bill limiting workers' comp claims by athletes is sent to governor (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)
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Tembow

Sunday, September 15, 2013

Bill limiting workers' comp claims by athletes is sent to governor

Today's post was shared by Workers Comp Brief and comes from www.latimes.com

Months of heavy lobbying by the National Football League and other professional sports team owners paid off when lawmakers gave final passage to a bill to limit most workers' compensation claims by out-of-state professional athletes.

The bill, AB 1309 by Assemblyman Henry T. Perea (D-Fresno), cleared the Assembly on a 66-3 vote and was sent to Gov. Jerry Brown. The governor is expected to sign the bill into law, Perea's office said.

Last week, the measure received an overwhelming endorsement in the state Senate with a 34-2 vote.

Perea's proposal, which was opposed by the NFL Players' Assn. and the AFL-CIO, would close a provision in California law that allowed players from out of state to file workers' compensation claims for so-called cumulative trauma, including head injuries that manifested themselves years after their careers had ended.

Many of those players may have participated in just a handful of games in California over the course of their careers.

During the bill's eight-month transit through the Legislature, team owners argued that California had become a de facto forum for claims filed against football, baseball, basketball, hockey and soccer franchises and their insurance companies.

Players unions countered that the employers don't want to be responsible for their former workers' head injuries and other ailments.

Former athletes have filed more than 4,400 claims involving head and brain injuries since 2006, according to the state workers'...

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State Senate passes bill limiting pro teams' workers' comp liability (workers-compensation.blogspot.com)
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Tembow

Minimum wage in California to be $10 an hour

As wages rise so do rates of payment under workers compensation laws. Likewise, workers' compensationinsurance premiums increase also.Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.nbcnews.com

Minimum wage workers in California would earn $10 an hour by 2016 under a bill passed by the legislature on Thursday, making the state likely to become the first in the nation to commit to such a high rate.

The bill, which Governor Jerry Brown said he will sign, would increase the minimum wage for hourly workers in the most populous U.S. state from the current rate of $8 an hour to $9 in July 2014, and to $10 by January 2016.

"The minimum wage has not kept pace with rising costs," Brown, a Democrat, said in a statement. "This legislation is overdue and will help families that are struggling in this harsh economy."
Brown, protective of the state's tenuous economic recovery, had initially opposed the bill but agreed to support it on Wednesday after leaders of both houses of the Democratic-led state legislature agreed to postpone the effective date of the raise until 2016.

The measure won support from Democrats, passing the Senate on a vote of 26-11 and the Assembly on a vote of 51-25. But it was opposed by many Republicans who said it would hurt small businesses and ultimately cost some low-wage workers their jobs.

"The impact of this is not on huge employers," said Republican Senator Jim Nielsen, who represents much of the far northern part of the state near the Oregon border. "It is on the smaller employer, the mom and pop operation."

To get the bill passed, leaders in the more conservative state Assembly had to win...

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Tembow

Worrisome or not? Lung nodules identified on initial LDCT lung cancer screening

Today's post was shared by NEJM and comes from blogs.nejm.org

Long the domain of astrologers and tarot card readers, prediction has recently become downright fashionable. While quant-minded individuals like Billy Beane and Nate Silver have achieved fame and fortune using probabilistic forecasting, dozens of smartphone apps deliver the predictive insight of clinical risk scores to doctors’ fingertips. Why all the enthusiasm? Accurate predictions allow us to prepare for the future.

Testing their predictive mettle in this week’s NEJM, Dr. Annette McWilliams (British Columbia Cancer Agency, Vancouver, Canada) and colleagues ask a deceptively simple research question: If a low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) lung cancer screening test detects a lung nodule, can we use the information at hand to accurately predict if it is malignant?

Using clinical and LDCT data from 1871 current or former smokers in the PanCan study, the investigators developed a model to predict when a newly discovered nodule was cancerous. Model variables included age, family history of lung cancer, and the presence of emphysema as well as nodule size, type, and location. Next, the investigators tested this prediction model in a cohort of 1090 current and former smokers enrolled in several British Columbia Cancer Agency chemoprevention trials. They found their model successfully discriminated between higher-risk and lower-risk nodules even within this validation cohort (AUC = 0.97, 95%CI 0.95-0.99), suggesting that the model can also be generalized to other...

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Tembow

Saturday, September 14, 2013

California minimum wage bill close to final passage

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

A bill that would boost California's minimum wage by 25% to $10 an hour won a key vote Thursday and is just one step away from the governor's desk.

What Gov. Jerry Brown will do with it is no mystery. The governor on Wednesday pledged to sign the measure, AB 10 by Assemblyman Luis Alejo (D-Watsonville). Brown's support was bolstered by endorsements from the Democratic majority leaders of both the state Senate and the state Assembly.

"The minimum wage has not kept pace with rising costs," Brown said.

"This is an unprecedented wage hike," said Jot Condie, president of the California Restaurant Assn. He predicted that many of the state's 87,000 eateries would deal with increased labor costs by cutting back employees' hours and by reducing hiring.

But, Louis Benitez, 51, a waiter at the J.W. Marriott Hotel in Los Angeles welcomed the possibility of a wage increase. "It would be a big help to get a little bit more money per hour," said Benitez, who earns tips as well as the minimum hourly wage.

The bill passed the state Senate on a vote of 26 to 11. It's expected to win final approval from the Assembly on Thursday, before lawmakers recess for the year on Friday.

If it becomes law, it would raise the current $8 minimum wage to $9 an hour next July 1 and to $10 on Jan. 1, 2016.

A minimum wage hike would be the first in California since Jan. 1, 2008.

The state currently has the eighth highest minimum wage in the country. Washington...

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Tembow

How Wal-Mart keeps wages low

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

“I think they don’t want me to actually let people know what’s really going on at Wal-Mart as an associate,” Lopez told me in an interview for the Nation following her June 21 firing. “So they’d rather get rid of me.”

Firings like Lopez’s may not come as a shock — Wal-Mart once shut down a store in Canada after workers there won collective bargaining rights, and it eliminated its entire U.S. meat-cutting department after a handful of meat-cutters at one store voted to unionize. But the alleged retaliation defies an eight-decade-old promise from the federal government to most U.S. workers:

Banding together to improve your workplace, whether you win or lose, shouldn’t cost you your job. That 1935 law — the National Labor Relations Act – is still on the books. But its ban on retaliation today reads more like a cruel joke than an ironclad commitment. A 2009 study released by the progressive Economic Policy Institute found that pro-union workers are fired — allegedly illegally — in at least a third of unionization election campaigns supervised by the government.

As expected, Wal-Mart denies illegally retaliating against anyone. The company claims that some of the discipline was unrelated to the protests — Lopez ostensibly lost her job for violating a food safety policy by bringing the employee handbook into the deli area where she works. And Wal-Mart says other workers were punished not for...

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Tembow

Ideas of Federal Panel on Long-Term Care Don’t Cover Costs

Today's post was shared by The New Old Age and comes from newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com

The federal Commission on Long-Term Care on Friday issued more than two dozen recommendations meant to bolster services for older Americans and people with disabilities, but stopped short of endorsing a new public or private program to help families pay for home health care, custodial care, assisted living or nursing home services.

“We’re disappointed,” said James Firman, president of the National Council on Aging. “They kind of ducked the most important issue.”

The commission was established by Congress last January after the demise of the Class Act, a voluntary long-term care insurance program originally part of the Affordable Care Act. It was given limited resources, an ambitious agenda and a very tight timetable: the first meeting was held in June, three months before the deadline for issuing a report.

Many experts judged it a “semi-serious, halfhearted effort on behalf of the Congress,” Mr. Firman said.

Yet how to pay for the rising costs of long-term care is a pressing problem. Public programs and families spent $317 billion on long-term care services — nursing homes, home health aides and so forth — in 2011, according to the Congressional Research Service. AARP estimates the yearly value of unpaid care provided by 42 million caregivers at $450 billion.

More than 12 million Americans rely on long-term care services, and the number is expected to expand sharply as baby boomers age. Only impoverished older Americans and...

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Tembow

N.Y. AG announces order against major tobacco companies

Today's post was shared by Legal Newsline and comes from legalnewsline.com

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced Thursday that a panel of arbitrators threw out an $800 million claim brought by major tobacco companies against New York state.

Schneiderman

The arbitrators ordered the tobacco companies, known collectively as Big Tobacco, to pay New York state more than $92 million in money the companies allegedly withheld from their 2003 annual payment due under the 1998 tobacco Master Settlement Agreement. The arbitration panel rejected Big Tobacco’s demand for a significant reduction in its annual payment to New York.

The claim alleged that New York state was not in full compliance with agreement obligations related to the taxation of cigarettes to or on Indian reservations. Consequently, Big Tobacco alleged the state was not entitled to its complete payment. The arbitrators denied the claim, which could protect the state from billions of dollars in future claims.
“This ruling is a huge victory for all New Yorkers, and I applaud the panel for denying Big Tobacco’s efforts to avoid responsibility for illnesses caused by cigarettes-and paid for by taxpayers,”

Schneiderman said. “Big Tobacco companies contribute to the deaths of thousands of people every year, in large part by luring more and more young people onto cigarettes. Finally, these companies will be required to reimburse the state for money spent treating New Yorkers made ill by their deadly product.”
In...

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Tembow

Exxon Mobil subsidiary charged for wastewater spill in Pennsylvania

Today's post was shared by WCBlog and comes from jurist.org

Photo source or description

Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane [official website] filed criminal charges on Tuesday against XTO Energy, an Exxon Mobil [corporate websites] subsidiary based in Fort Worth, Texas, related to a spill of more than 50,000 gallons of chemical-laced wastewater in 2010.

Having already been fined $100,000 by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) [official website] and the Department of Justice (DOJ) [official website] in July, XTO claims that the polluting of a Susquehanna River tributary [Reuters report], located near the company's water recycling plant in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania, was an accident. On Tuesday, XTO was charged under the state's Clean Streams Law [text, PDF] and Solid Waste Management Act [text, PDF], both of which carry prison sentences as possible punishment.

According to XTO [press release], "The criminal charges filed by the Attorney General are unprecedented and an abuse of prosecutorial discretion." XTO admitted no wrongdoing [WSJ report] as part of the settlement with the EPA and DOJ.

The Exxon Mobil Corp. has previously faced allegations of improper conduct. In 2011 the US District Court for the District of Alaska refused to reopen [JURIST report] the $900 million settlement agreement that was reached in 1991 following the infamous Exxon Valdez oil spill [BBC backgrounder; JURIST news archive] of 1989. Following similar attempts to reopen the settlement [JURIST report] by the US and Alaskan government in 2006, the US Supreme...

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Tembow

More than 1,100 have cancer after 9/11

Today's post was shared by WCBlog and comes from www.cnn.com

Reggie Hilaire was a rookie cop on September 11, 2001.

He worked at ground zero for 11 days beside his colleagues -- many of them, including Hilaire, not wearing a mask. He was later assigned to a landfill in Staten Island, where debris from the World Trade Center was dumped.

For about 60 days between 2001 and 2002, the New York police officer was surrounded by dust.

In 2005, Hilaire was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. He underwent surgery and radiation. Just months later his doctor told him he also had multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that multiplies the body's plasma cells to dangerous levels.

It's a cancer that usually strikes much later in life. Hilaire was 34.

More than 1,100 people who worked or lived near the World Trade Center on 9/11 have been diagnosed with cancer, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A few months ago Hilaire received a letter from the CDC's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, officially offering him medical insurance under the World Trade Center Health Program. About 1,140 people have been certified to receive cancer treatment under the WTC Health Program, a representative told CNN.

These are the first numbers released since the program was expanded a year ago.

In September 2012, federal health authorities added 58 types of cancer to the list of covered illnesses for people who were exposed to toxins at the site of the World Trade Center in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Dr. John Howard,...

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The Public and the Conflict over Future Medicare Spending

Medicare will govern the at least the cost of workers' compensation medical delivery benefits. Today's post was shared by NEJM and comes from www.nejm.org

Two recent government reports show substantial short-term improvements in the financial outlook for Medicare and in the federal budget deficit.1,2 However, these forecasts also suggest the need for further action brought about by a worsening of the financial situation after 2015 as the number of Medicare recipients increases from 52 million to 73 million in the decade following.1-3 This issue is likely to receive considerable attention in the upcoming debate about the federal budget deficit and the national debt.

As we reported in the Journal in 2011, there has been little public support for major policy changes aimed at reducing Medicare spending to lower the federal deficit.4 This article goes further and seeks to document the underlying beliefs that may shape the public response to future efforts to substantially slow projected Medicare spending. Our thesis is that there exists today a wide gap in beliefs between experts on the financial state of Medicare and the public at large. Because of the potential electoral consequences, these differences in perception are likely to have ramifications for policymakers addressing this issue.

We examine this thesis by analyzing data from six public opinion polls conducted in 2013 with 1013 to 2017 U.S. adults, plus historical data, in a project supported by the Robert Wood Johnson...

Robert J. Blendon, Sc.D., and John M. Benson, M.A.

N Engl J Med 2013; 369:1066-1073September 12, 2013 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMsr1307622

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Tembow

CA's New Rate Filing Reflects Uncertainty

Today's post was shared by WorkCompCentral and comes from daviddepaolo.blogspot.com

The political grandstanding that is typical this time of year when the California Workers' Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau publishes is pure premium rate request should be boisterous.
The WCIRB's Governing Committee yesterday voted unanimously to approve a 2014 advisory pure premium rate of $2.70 per $100 of payroll.

This is 3% more than the $2.62 rate the committee approved in August and is 6.9% higher than the average insurer filed rate of $2.53.

And even then rates may be inadequate to cover loss developments according to members.
The combined ratio remains well north of 100%.

Much of the uncertainty stems from the pending conversion to the Resource Based Relative Value Scale for physician reimbursement.

Estimates on the impact of the conversion range from no impact to an increase of up to several hundred million dollars.

The reason for the vagueness is that there are codes in the current system that have not yet been "cross talked" to the RVRBS.

Adding to the complexity is that for unknown reasons claim frequency has been climbing.
Increased frequency and medical loss-cost development that was observed in data collected through the end of June accounts for more than two-thirds of the proposed rate increase. (About 2% of the increase for 2014 is attributed to higher permanent disability benefits.)

Some suspect this is due to resolution of complex older claims that had been languishing because of Medicare set-aside requirements as well as the nature of the injuries.
Since...

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Tembow

Cambridge Metal & Plastics Recalls Motorcycle Training Wheels Due to a Crash Hazard

Today's post was shared by U.S. CPSC and comes from www.cpsc.gov

Motorcycle dealerships nationwide and at Mooseracing.com, Parts-unlimited.com and other online retailers from July 2012 through June 2013 for about $130.

Manufacturer

Cambridge Metals & Plastics, a Division of Water Works Manufacturing Inc., of Cambridge, Minn.

DLeMans Corporation Inc., of Janesville, Wis.

Manufactured in

United States

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Tembow

EPA Web Tool Expands Access to Scientific, Regulatory Information on Chemicals

Today's post was shared by US EPA News and comes from yosemite.epa.gov

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has launched a web-based tool, called ChemView, to significantly improve access to chemical specific regulatory information developed by EPA and data submitted under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).

“This online tool will improve access to chemical health and safety information, increase public dialogue and awareness, and help viewers choose safer ingredients used in everyday products,” said James Jones, assistant administrator for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention.

“The tool will make chemical information more readily available for chemical decision-makers and consumers.”The ChemView web tool displays key health and safety data in an online format that allows comparison of chemicals by use and by health or environmental effects.

The search tool combines available TSCA information and provides streamlined access to EPA assessments, hazard characterizations, and information on safer chemical ingredients. Additionally, the new web tool allows searches by chemical name or Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) number, use, hazard effect, or regulatory action.

It has the flexibility to create tailored views of the information on individual chemicals or compare multiple chemicals sorted by use, hazard effect or other criteria. The new portal will also...

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Tembow

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