The gate. The chart. Scarring.
Changes in Rhode Island’s workers’ compensation law being considered by
a task force of the Workers’ Compensation Advisory Council may affect
the insurance premiums businesses pay and the benefits injured workers
receive.
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Last spring, in response to labor demands for repeal of workers’
compensation law provisions that permit employers to drastically reduce
injured workers’ benefits, and business claims that Rhode Island’s
system for compensating scarring is too costly, the advisory council
formed a task force to review the issues.
Chaired by AFL-CIO secretary- treasurer George Nee, the task force
includes Workers’ Compensation Court Judge George Healy, Beacon Mutual
Insurance Company president Donald Vass and Slater Dye Works vice
president Chuck Mitchell. Its findings will be reported to the advisory
council whose proposals on complex workers’ compensation legislation are
traditionally rubber stamped into law by the General Assembly.
Last week, at its second meeting, the task force concentrated on
scarring. Currently, Rhode Island workers receive a maximum of $90 week
for a maximum of 500 weeks in additional workers’ ompensation benefits
for scars caused by job related injuries. Workers receive less for a 2
inch hernia scar, for instance, than for a facial burn, but business and
labor advocates at the meeting agreed awards vary widely depending on
the judge assigned to the case.
Since 1996, the Rhode Island Self Insurers Association (now renamed the
Workers’ Compensation Association of Rhode Island Employers) has
proposed legislation to standardize scarring awards by establishing a
payment schedule. The employers association also proposes eliminating
payments for all scars except those on the face, neck or hands,
association attorney Michael Lynch told the task force. Other states
restrict scarring payments to visible body parts, Lynch explains.
Lynch was supported by Mark McKenney a representative of the Northern
Rhode Island Chamber of Commerce. But he was opposed by workers’
attorney Stephen Dennis who contended no change in current law was
necessary. “We have so little since [the law changed in] 1992,” Dennis
stated, “I’d hate to see my clients lose scarring.”
The proposal to establish a scarring schedule was also questioned by
Healy, a former insurance company lawyer. Scarring payments are damages
awards, Healy observed, not compensation for lost earnings. Therefore,
he concluded, they must be tailored to the individual, not set by a
formula.
To demonstrate the impact of scarring awards on insurance premiums, Vass
presented Beacon Mutual claims data indicating that scarring payments
represent 12 percent of all non-medical workers’ compensation expenses.
Other data, compiled by the Rhode Island Department of Labor and
Training (RIDLT), showed a smaller impact. Scarring, also known as
disfigurement, accounts for five percent of total workers’ compensation
costs, according to RIDLT statistics.
The task force will again discuss scarring at its next meeting, starting
with a presentation from workers’ attorney John Harnett.
The task force is also gathering information on “the gate,” the system’s
virtual six-year cap on benefits and “the chart,” an American Medical
Association (AMA) publication used to determine functional impairment.
At last week’s meeting, Healy presented information that since the
gate’s inception in 1996, the court has sided with only three workers
seeking to pass through and receive benefits for more than six years.
Healy had no estimate of the number of workers whose benefits had been
cut off at their employers’ request after six years.
In recent years, representatives of Injured Workers of Rhode Island and
the labor financed lobby group Ocean State Action have attacked the gate
as an unjust method of terminating compensation benefits for all but the
most severely injured workers. Vass, however, said the gate is a major
factor in Rhode Island’s forty percent reduction in workers’
compensation premiums. Insurance companies no longer have to amass huge
reserves to pay long term injured workers, Vass explained, because few
will receive benefits after six years.
