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

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'... [Click here to see the rest of this post] Related articles State Senate passes bill limiting pro teams' workers' comp liability (workers-compensation.blogspot.com) California bill limiting workers' comp claims by athletes advances (workers-compensation.blogspot.com) California Senate Oks Limits On Workers' Comp For Pro Athletes (insurancejournal.com) The uneven playing field of workers' compensation (workers-compensation.blogspot.com) After Suggested Workers' Comp Rate Hike California Employers Hope Reform Kicks In (insurancejournal.com) Calif. State Senate OKs Limits On Worker Comp For Pro Athletes (sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com)

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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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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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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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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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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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