Iowa View: Workers' compensation hardly favors employees
Des Moines Register, September 16, 2008
NATE BOULTON is a workers' compensation attorney from Des Moines.
The Register published a news story last month ("UPS Worker Loses Temper but Wins Compensation") that made a workers' compensation claim seem frivolous to most readers. The paper later printed a correction, though, because the decision actually held that the injury was separate from the outburst.
Nonetheless, the story is now legend and is being used by business groups to promote their agenda. They contend, as a corporate lobbyist stated in the article, that workers' compensation in Iowa "favors" employees at the expense of our employers. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The real problem with the system is that it fails to adequately care for and compensate many workers who suffer severe and often career-ending job-related injuries. Employees who suffer work-related injuries have no voice in selecting doctors or surgeons. Instead, employers and their insurance companies control medical care, resulting in frequent problems, because these groups work to avoid treatment expenses.
At an April news conference in New York, Dr. Robert McLellan, president of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, explained that doctors can feel "methodically pressured" by the companies who retain them to "under-treat and mistreat (injured workers)." He added, "This is a grave ethical concern for our members. It's a grave medical concern."
The treatment problems alone are troubling, but there is more. An injured employee has the burden of proving that his or her injury is work-related as well as the extent of the injury. This is difficult when the employer controls the medical care from day one, while the employee is provided only a single second opinion. This burden alone shows the absurdity of claims that the system favors workers.
Iowa law also provides that an injured worker's benefits are based on an arbitrary schedule for injuries to certain body parts, including the arms and legs. That schedule limits a worker to predetermined weekly benefits without concern for the injury's impact on that worker's ability to earn a living. A meatpacker who loses a hand at work is paid the same number of weeks as an attorney with the same injury. While the attorney's employability is hardly affected, the meatpacker has likely been eliminated from an entire field of work. Yet this is the system that supposedly favors workers.
Finally, the financial difficulties faced by injured workers can be extreme. There are often long delays before benefits are paid. Many individuals who are unable to work after injury live without income until the case is resolved years down the road. Consider the troubles faced by a worker who is permanently disabled after a work accident. This is someone who will never be able to work again, and any successful claim will provide only a fixed rate of around two-thirds of his or her pre-injury wages, with no cost-of-living adjustments. If injured at age 25, that person will be living on the same fixed rate at age 60, scraping by for basic necessities such as milk and gas after 35 years of price increases.
In making complaints, business groups fail to mention that Iowa's system is a bargain for employers. The Workers ' Compensation Research Institute, a firm funded by employers and insurance companies, reported that the low cost to employers in Iowa puts our system at a competitive advantage. Iowa has some of the lowest workers ' compensation insurance premiums in the country, better than the states we border. Organizations from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the National Council on Compensation Insurance recognize Iowa's system as one of the nation's best for employers. This shows that we can make the system fairer for workers and remain an attractive location for businesses.
Our workers ' compensation system can and should do more, not less, to protect Iowans when work-related injuries threaten their livelihood. Workers need more control of their own medical care, deserve fair benefit rates that keep up with the cost of living, and ought to be compensated when their earning capacity is reduced after injury regardless of what body part is hurt. That is not "favorable"; that's fair.