Perhaps the most important item on the agenda is the April 28 Scaffold Safety seminar.  Scaffold and high-rise safety has been in the news several times already this year since the crane collapse that killed seven workers on March 15, 2008.

Following the rash of worker deaths earlier this year and criticism from Mayor Bloomberg, Patricia Lancaster resigned her post as the city's building commissioner.  She has been replaced by acting commissioner Robert D. LiMandri.  The city remains committed to worker safety, demonstrating that committment with another $4 million in funding to the Buildings Department to hire 20 specialized engineers to reinspect excavation, concrete, and crane operations around the city.

The doctor?s are upset that employers seem to care more about their own bottom lines than about their employees well-beings.  It works something like this.  Employers are required to record all workplace injuries that require time off or medical treatment beyond first aid.  Workplaces with low injury rates have lower insurance premiums.  So employers have an incentive to under-treat injuries.  For instance, a cut that might require stitches is sometimes treated with a simple bandage.  Because the bandage is ?first aid,? but stitches are not, the bandage goes unreported and the insurance premiums stay low.

Outraged that ACOEM members are pressured by employers to under-treat their patients, McLellan has contacted the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and expects to meet with them about his concerns next month.  ACOEM?s goals are to have OSHA regulators rely on a broad spectrum of workplace safety measures (not just the number of injuries) and to rewrite some of the rules in order to remove the incentive to underreport injuries.

Anything that gets employers to stop caring so much about their bottom lines and a little more about their employees sounds good to us!

The New York Workers' Compensation Law (WCL) allows for groups of similarly situated employers to enter into self-insured trusts to fund their workers' compensation liability. In the past, there have been self-insured trusts for "Beer Wholesalers" and "Health Care Industry Workers". The purpose of such trusts was to allow like employers to pool their risk and receive reduced premiums, while allow the administrators of such trusts to specifically tailor its claims practices to those unique industries - and thereby properly and sensibly set premiums. This has never really happened.

Many of these self-insured trusts remain or were woefully underfunded, and this has led to the NYS WCB seeking to shut those trusts down. In fact, the Chairman of the WCB, Zachary Weiss had proposed funding reform to assure liqudity of these trusts and has recently requested authorization for a $60 million bond issue to help defray the costs of the suspensions an to assure continued payment to injured workers covered under these defunct trusts!

While I appauled the Chairman for seeking to reassure the system, what is wrong here? Why should injured workers suffer due to the inefficiencies and negligence of the past administrations and the NYS WCB! Why should taxpayers be invovled in bond issues to bail out big business that has made money hand over fist in the workers' compensation arena.

Unfortuantely, my experience has shown me that even with the protections being sought, it is the injured worker who will suffer. Who will pay the checks? What will the delay be? Who will handle these claims? If our experience with insurance carriers in liquidation is any example, these answers are simple...the injured worker will be forced to suffer during the delays and administrative nightmares piled on top of an already over-beauracratic system!

In a third-party complaint filed last week, AIG accused Liberty Mutual, The Hartford Financial Services Group, adn a dozen other insurance companies of dumping the shared costs of the pool on AIG and suppressing probes into their own business practices.

The dispute here is ultimately over who gets to foot the bill for the underfunded state reinsurance pool.  New York established the reinsurance pool to serve as a payor of last resort for workers' compensation claims in the case that an insurance company went bankrupt.  As a trade-off for the privilege of doing business in New York, each insurance company is required to submit payment into the reinsurance pool in proportion to their share of the New York workers' compensation market.  So, if a company was writing 11% of the workers' compensation contracts, they would be responsible for 11% of the pool.

However, companies soon realized that if they could underrepresent the amount of money that they were making from the New York, they would be able to save money off of their share of the reinsurance pool.

AIG was busted back in 2006 and was to pay over $300 million in unpaid costs and is now trying to shift the blame away from themselves and onto the other workers' compensation insurance companies. 

149 people were arrested for workers' compensation fraud, including 89 who had been fraudulently accepting benefits while secretly working second jobs.

The New York Insurance Department's press release can be accessed here.

Because many seniors and disabled individuals are either on supplemental security income or social security disability, they do not earn enough income to be required to file the tax paperwork.  However, in order to be eligible for the rebate, the Social Security Administration is reminding citizens that filing is a must.

Anyone recieving Social Security benefits should read this page of the IRS website, which contains information on how to be sure that you recieve your payment.

As we have previously reported, the SSA has some serious backlog issues, but the hiring of news judges is a good first step toward speeding up the claims process.  Other steps include opening a National Hearing Center, completing a nationwide Quick Disability Determination program, implementing compassionate allowances, and eliminating aged cases.

The SSA anticipates hiring a total of 175 new Administrative Law Judges this year.  Due to litigation and budget cuts, the agency currently has about 10% fewer ALJs than it did ten years ago.  Unfortunately, the number of cases awaiting decision has more than doubled during that same ten years.

Second, during the recent workers' compensation reform negotiations, all the negotiators from the Governor's office, Speaker Silver's office and Senate Majority Leader Bruno's office  promised that "AMA Guidelines will never come to NY!".  Well, word on the street is that the Governor's man heading the Medical Guidelines Task Force just hired Dr. Christopher Brigham, the insurance and defense industry's best friend, to implement the AMA guidelines in New York.   With more flip-flops like this, Governor Spitzer may morph into Mitt Romney - and we all know where good 'ol Mitt is now.

While this effort is laudable, there is still more wokr to be done.  The next step of the plan is to reduce the number of hearing requests at are at least 900 days old.  There are over 135,000 such requests, which have been pending for nearly 3 years.  That number represents 18.1% of the total cases before the ODAR.

The plan to continue to expedite these cases is three-fold and should eventually trickle down to make the entire process much faster

First, the agency plans to improve hearing office procedures by reducing the nubmer of aged cases and allowing senior attorneys to make initial adjudicatory decisions.

Second, the agency will increase adjudicatory capacity by filling the Administrative Law Judge's dockets to capacity.  The plan also involves the hiring of more Administrative Law Judges and improving their productivity.

The final step in the plan is to increase the agency's efficiency by automating some of the processes.  By using electronic files, the agency hopes to streamline the hearing process.

The full report from ODAR may be accessed here. 

New York recieved an "A+" for Public Health and Safety.  The state performed particularly well in "Annual per capita expenditure on hospital care," ranking third in the country.

The state recieved "B-" grades for both Access to and Quality of Care.  Contributing to this sub-par score was New York's ranking of 43rd in "Percentage of population with access to Enhanced 911 services" and 49th in "Number of emergency departments per 1 million people."

However, the state recieved a "D-" in the Medical Liability category.  Most of the Medical Liability grade was based on the $250,000 non-economic cap on medical malpractice liability.  This cap prevents plaintiffs from recovering more than a quarter-million for pain and suffering due to physician negligence.