Just in time for a scheduled meeting of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs to discuss the status of the Social Security Disability program (SSDI) on October 7th, on Sunday, October 6, CBS’ popular “news” show, 60 Minutes, aired “Disability USA” – a sensationalized program full of misleading and largely anecdotal information designed to convince viewers the program is riddled with fraud and on the brink of collapse. If you watched this program, and it is your sole source of information about Social Security Disability, you know essentially nothing about the actual operation of the program. You heard not a single word from disability recipients, their advocates, or from officials who administer the program, none of whom were invited to participate in the 60 Minutes piece.
…the 60 Minutes segment focused on some fraud in the program in one impoverished area of the country in order to paint disability recipients generally as the undeserving poor, slackers and frauds.
First, listening to the program you might not have understood that the average monthly benefit of about $1100 is not tax-payer money but earned credits for money paid into the system by the disabled worker. Then, in terms of the “shocking” growth of the disability rolls you heard CBS’s Steve Kroft and Senator Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma natter on about, you didn’t hear that the statistical growth of the program is a direct function of the increase in population over the past 30 years, the aging of the baby-boomer population into their higher disability years, the entry of women into the work force in greater numbers, and similar demographic factors. Finally, you likely came away from the program thinking that qualifying for SSDI is a cakewalk, when the actual standards for disability result in denial of two-thirds of all applications, only 10% of those denials being reversed on appeal, and an overall figure of about 41% of applicants ultimately qualifying.
Completely ignored in this puff-piece for the right wing (Coburn is the lead Republican on the Senate Subcommittee for Investigations and has a long-standing, well-documented hostility to Social Security) is the shifting of responsibility for disability from workers’ compensation systems, where it properly belongs, to the Social Security Disability program because of the rollbacks in coverage and benefits in states’ workers’ comp programs across the country, all driven by right-wing and corporate interests. So, while SSDI faces potential exhaustion of its funds in the next few years (although this can be – and in the past has been – remedied by shifting funds from the Social Security old-age program), the liability insurance industry, which includes workers’ compensation carriers, is enjoying record profits over the last two years.
Similarly unmentioned was the impact of the worst economy in decades, shrinking the ability of disabled workers to find less physically challenging work.
As is typically the case with these types of “news” pieces, the 60 Minutes segment focused on some fraud in the program in one impoverished area of the country in order to paint disability recipients generally as the undeserving poor, slackers and frauds. CBS could have moderated the potential negative impact of its program by including interviews of SSA program officials or of spokespersons from some two dozen national disability advocacy organizations who asked to be heard on this show. It shamefully chose to ignore all such requests, and has diminished itself accordingly as a news organization.
Today’s post comes from guest author Rod Rehm from Rehm, Bennett & Moore.
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, also known as CTS, is an uncomfortable and often painful wrist disorder. It is a common injury that can be caused by workplace stress. Here are four things you should know about Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is caused by repeated stress.
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is a Repetitive Stress Injury (RST). It occurs when the same action is repeated many times. When wrists are strained over and over again by actions like typing, the tendons in the wrist can become enlarged. Then the tendons can compress a nerve that runs through a passage in the wrist called the “carpal tunnel.”
Even if your wrists don’t hurt badly, you could still have CTS.
There are a whole range of symptoms associated with CTS, not just pain. Symptoms of CTS can include numbness or tingling pain in the hand, wrist, and forearm, impaired or lost nerve function, reduced muscle control, and reduced grip strength.
You can receive workers’ compensation for CTS.
According to Nebraska and Iowa law, workers can receive workers’ compensation from the onset of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. This compensation includes 100% of all medical expenses that are reasonable and necessary to treat CTS, including both inpatient and outpatient care and prescriptions.
The Washington State Workers’ Comp Solvency Crisis is Going Away…
Let’s review the history here. In 2010, Washington voters rejected, by an 18-point margin, an initiative to “privatize” our workers’ compensation system. The impetus for the initiative, sponsored by the business and insurance community, was to bring “free market” savings to the system and save it from collapse. That effort having failed miserably, the powers that be stirred up the 2011 Washington Legislature over the financial plight of the Department of Labor & Industry’s (Department) lack of reserves, largely due to the recession which started in 2008. The 2011 legislature passed a series of measures, including a limited form of “lump-sum buyouts” for certain claims and more employer control over injured workers’ medical treatment, that were expected to generate about $1.3 billion in savings over four years. Fast forward to 2013, and those 2011 amendments are now actually projected to save about $1.5 billion with no further changes. And some of the 2011 changes have not even been fully implemented yet.
The bottom line here is that any basis for the panic and frenzy whipped up by business and the Republican Senate about the impending collapse or insolvency of our system has disappeared, and there now should be no reason to reintroduce measures that even further limit the rights and remedies of Washington’s injured and diseased workers in the upcoming session.
At a Workers’ Compensation Advisory Committee meeting in June of 2012, which focused on a State Auditor’s report about the low level of the Contingency Reserve, a worst-case scenario projecting the possibility of ten years of double-digit rate increases caused business lobbyists to start a mantra about a “mother of all rate increases” just around the corner. But, following a large rate increase in 2011 to stabilize the accident insurance fund, and despite continuing medical cost inflation, the solvency of the fund has improved such that our workers’ compensation system had an average rate increase of ZERO in 2012 and 2013! Despite the improved financial picture for compensating Washington’s injured and diseased workers, the business community, aided by Republican legislators, brought an array of “reform” bills to the 2013 legislative session – including a wide open “lump-sum buyout” bill that would have extended this process to the vast majority of claims, essentially gutting Washington’s one hundred year-old system of workers’ compensation. The ostensible reason cited by legislators in our Republican-controlled Senate as necessitating these changes has been the still relatively low amount in the Department’s Contingency Reserve for funding the system in the future.
The array of bills brought to the session, opposed by the Democrat-controlled House and Governor Inslee, died at the end of the regular session. However, the so-called “reform” proponents are lining up to reintroduce some of these in the Special Session which began on May 13. Based on information recently released by the Department, the air may have gone out of the “reform” balloon. The Department reports a net operations income of $250 million in the second half of 2012, and most importantly, the system’s Contingency Reserve increased 64% from June to December of 2012, way above projections! And even without a rate increase in 2013, the Department projects it will add another $82 million to reserves by the end of the year. At this point, a very modest 5.5% rate increase is projected for 2014 to keep building the Reserve fund back to its appropriate level.
The bottom line here is that any basis for the panic and frenzy whipped up by business and the Republican Senate about the impending collapse or insolvency of our system has disappeared, and there now should be no reason to reintroduce measures that even further limit the rights and remedies of Washington’s injured and diseased workers in the upcoming session.
Shadows on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Memorial
On March 25, 1911 a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York City. In 18 minutes 146 garment workers, mostly young women, were dead. The hideous circumstances of the tragedy – widely depicted by the media with front-page pictures of the corpses of women who had jumped from the building windows to avoid being burned to death – incited a wave of public revulsion that contributed to New York’s enactment of one of the nation’s first workers’ compensation statutes. This occurred in the so-called “Progressive” era of American political history – now largely a distant memory – when within the next decade the majority of states followed suit.
One hundred years later, similar tragedies in the world-wide garment industry, which feeds U.S. corporations like WalMart, H&M, and Gap, occur with scant media attention other than the possible effect of such disasters on corporate business operations. In November of 2012, 112 garment workers died in a fire at a Bangladeshi factory producing WalMart clothing. (A manager had reportedly closed an exit gate after the fire alarm sounded, telling workers nothing was wrong and to just keep working.) In another Bangladeshi factory on January 26, 2013, a fire killed seven garment workers who could not escape due to a blocked exit.
Rather than expressing outrage over these circumstances, U.S. media, including the New York Times, characterized these incidents not as human tragedies, inexcusably occurring in the 21st century industrial world, but as “blows to the Bangladeshi garment industry.” The fact is that with the globalization of that industry, these Bangladeshi workers are essentially “our” workers, making the clothes Americans wear, sold to us by U.S. corporate behemoths competing to do this at the lowest price possible they think will be acceptable to the American consumer. The media is complicit in disconnecting these tragedies from our consciousness as intolerable – just as was the sense of our citizenry after Triangle – by focusing it’s reporting on the economic impact to the garment business and blandly parroting the boilerplate disclaimers of responsibility given them by the industry.
The garment corporations could easily afford to ensure their foreign contractors increase workers’ wages and institute workers’ safety measures with a minimal impact on the final price and their bottom line.
These incidents are almost never reported in a way that puts the question to the American consumer as to whether we’d pay a bit more per unit of clothing to ensure the safety of these workers rather than participate in the race to the lowest possible price. Labor cost as a component of garment retail price is miniscule – one to two percent. The garment corporations could easily afford to ensure their foreign contractors increase workers’ wages and institute workers’ safety measures with a minimal impact on the final price and their bottom line.
As it turns out, however, when plans were being developed in 2011 to improve fire safety at Bangladeshi factories, those efforts were quashed by WalMart and Gap, who determined that preventing worker deaths from fire would cost too much: “It is not financially feasible for the brands to make such investment.”
Don’t expect to hear much more about all this from the corporate media.
Injured workers with claims under the Longshore & Harbor Workers Act and the Defense Base Act, who are awaiting hearings by federal administrative law judges (ALJs), have now had their cases seriously impacted by the Sequester. The Office of Administrative Law Judges (OALJ), with District Offices in seven cities including San Francisco, schedules hearings not only in those cities but in other venues in the District. The San Francisco office schedules hearings in San Diego, Seattle, Portland, Denver and elsewhere, and so-called Calendar Calls are scheduled in those cities by traveling ALJs.
The Sequester has caused the San Francisco office…to cancel all travel by ALJs until at least October, when a new fiscal year for OALJ may refresh its travel budget.
The Sequester has caused the San Francisco office, which covers a larger geographical territory than any other, to cancel all travel by ALJs until at least October, when a new fiscal year for OALJ may refresh its travel budget. No further Calendars in outlying cities will be scheduled until at least October. In the meantime, the parties may agree to bring their witnesses to San Francisco for hearings (or agree to a telephonic hearing – rarely a good alternative), but both sides must to agree to the alternative process. The cost of bringing the claimant and expert witnesses to San Francisco, even if jointly agreed to, makes that a mostly unrealistic option.
The cancellation of travel for ALJs makes the system even more unfair to claimants.
The likelihood is that, in claims where the insurance carrier is denying benefits, many carriers will simply choose to wait out the claimants for the many additional months delay the Sequester budget issue gives them. An terribly-burdensome delay already exists in this system, as ALJ decisions on cases typically take one to two years to issue after the trial. The cancellation of travel for ALJs makes the system even more unfair to claimants. Because of the long delay in getting to a hearing and then to a decision, a large number of cases in which hearings are requested ultimately end up settling in an alternative dispute resolution process called “mediation,” as both sides wish to arrive at settlement without the work and expense of getting ready for trial and then a long wait for a decision. A scheduled hearing is what mostly drives the parties to mediate these cases. But with six months of cancelled Calendars in non-District Office cities, claimants attorneys worry that insurance carriers will feel under far less pressure to bring these cases to the mediation table.
Workers have flooded North Dakota to work in the booming oil industry.
A recent article in the New York Times (An Oil Boom Takes a Toll on Health Care, January 28, 2013) recounted the growing burden on North Dakota hospitals because of on-the-job injuries to workers who have flooded that state to work in the booming oil industry. Apparently North Dakota hospitals are swimming in debt from unpaid bills because, as the article by John Eligon states, “many of the new patients are transient men without health insurance or a permanent address in the area.”
“Swamped by uninsured laborers flocking to dangerous jobs in the oil industry, the hospitals here in the North Dakota oil patch are sinking under skyrocketing debt, a flood of gruesome injuries and bloated business costs from the inflated economy.”– John Eligon, New York Times
Mr. Eligon goes on to discuss actions by the governor and state legislature to increase medical training and medical facilities in North Dakota, and to obtain increased Medicaid financing for the state’s rural hospitals. Not only are medical facilities groaning from the increase of gruesome injuries associated with highly dangerous work environments, Mr. Eligon recounts the health issues that arise from the cramped housing scenarios in the work camps that have sprung up near the oil fields. This includes a significant increase in the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases.
However, nowhere in Mr. Eligon’s article is there any mention of, or reference to, North Dakota’s workers compensation system which would seemingly provide the principal coverage for the injuries and conditions that are the subject of his article. Is the NYT oblivious to the fact of coverage for industrial injuries and conditions under each state’s workers compensation law? Or are workers injured in the new booming oil economy of North Dakota somehow being denied coverage under that state’s system, or being engineered out of coverage by the terms of their employment with the oil companies? It seems that a minimal inquiry, at least, on these points was owed by the NYT in its article.
I don’t get it.According to the polls, apparently, about 47-49% of you, perhaps even over 50%, will be voting for leaders from a political “party” whose underlying philosophy and interests stand so squarely against yours as a working-class American that you ought to be in the streets, on the picket lines, and storming corporate boardrooms over your current predicament. Not voting these people into office!
Why are 47-50% of you who work longer and harder than ever, own less than you did before, and have less opportunity to prosper – even considering empowering this cult’s agenda by putting them in office?
The new Republican Party – dramatically transformed from the relatively moderate one I grew up with in the 50s and 60s — can frankly be characterized as more of a political “cult” than a political party that seeks to govern responsibly. The overarching view of the new party, in the words of Grover Norquist you may have heard, is to “shrink government down to the size it can be dragged into the bathtub and drowned.” There may be leaders within the new Republican cult who are, individually, somewhat more moderate than the party’s current platform and philosophy, but in my view no working class citizen should be voting for any Republican who generally embraces the current Republican Party’s ideology about the role of government. And with rare exceptions, that’s all of them, either because they truly believe the nonsense they spout, or they are afraid to buck the Tea Party zealots who advance the cult’s philosophy and goals.
This new cult has fraudulently invested more power in corporate “personhood” than you will ever have as an actual “person.” Over the past 30+ years it has been responsible for the fact that in constant dollars the wages you now earn are about the same, or maybe slightly higher, than they were in the 1970s; and it has enabled a historic and dramatic shift in the ownership of wealth in this nation away from the working class, such that the top 1% now own 50% of the nation’s treasure. You have to go back before the Great Depression to find such inequality of wealth, and the accompanying inequality of opportunity.
This cult’s operational scheme over 30+ years has been to shrink the power and resources of the government (except for the military) that enable it to provide programs that serve you and protect your rights and opportunities. It mostly started with the actor Ronald Reagan who charmed millions into thinking that government “just didn’t work” for people (and it sure didn’t with that chucklehead – if you’re younger than 35 and not a history student, just about everything you “know” about Reagan is wrong, the product of right-wing historical revisionism over the past twenty years or so.) From that point on, the wealthy and corporate elites gradually manipulated our taxation system from the fair and equitable one it had been for the prior 25 years or so, resulting in drastic reductions in the contribution of corporations and the financial elites to the operation of government, while they simultaneously worked to erode statutory and regulatory protections against another meltdown of our economy.
From your standpoint, the other huge change in the workforce engendered by this cult has been the near total destruction of private sector unionism. Following World War II, and into the 60s and 70s, a unionized workforce was the bulwark of the middle class, ensuring that a fair percentage of wealth ownership, and the ability to consume the products we were manufacturing, remained with workers. When I started practicing workers’ compensation and other disability law in 1977, about 33-35% of the workforce was unionized. Today, in the private sector that number is around 8%. Other factors, such as the globalization of the economy, have contributed to this development, but make no mistake – it has mostly been driven by the increased power of corporate America to kill unionism, an essential component of the Republican cult’s philosophy. (Point of irony – who said: “When free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost”? Answer: Ronald Reagan, 1980. He then gutted the air traffic controllers’ union in 1981.)
Following World War II, and into the 60s and 70s, a unionized workforce was the bulwark of the middle class, ensuring that a fair percentage of wealth ownership, and the ability to consume the products we were manufacturing, remained with workers.
With wages stagnant substantially as a result of 30 years of anti-unionism, and with the shrunken wealth of the middle class, an economy like ours, hugely dependent on consumption by the working class, falters. The loss of power of the working class, together with the aftermath of our economic meltdown in 2008 – the direct product of the Republican cult’s evisceration of banking and financial regulations over the years – and the failure of the exalted “job creators,” sitting on trillions of cash, to create jobs, all have converged to create a vicious economic cycle from which it will be difficult to emerge for some time.
So who has the best chance to get us –albeit slowly – out of this mess? What part of the Republican cult’s philosophy of government do you see leading to a brighter future for your economic and other interests? (So far, I haven’t even mentioned the Republican cult of “privatization” of traditional governmental functions which has us all enriching corporations with no-bid contracts that statistically end up costing your government more for often sub-standard work than would have cost the government to employ people directly to do this work.) Please tell me exactly what part of the Republican cult’s agenda for our economy you really believe will work for you and not exclusively for the very tip-top of this country’s financial elite? Do you still really believe the cult’s “trickle-down” theory of our economy: protect corporations and the financial elites that run them from government “interference” and all good things will flow down to float the boat of the working middle class? How’s that worked out for you so far? (We’ll leave out of this discussion for now social issues, e.g. women’s reproductive rights, civil rights, climate change, and foreign policy, of which the current R’s have none except occasionally to bluster about starting another war.)
And when you think about how – somehow – the Republican economic agenda is really going to work for your interests, consider another aspect of how a Republican administration would impact the power of the working class: THE … SUPREME… COURT… (and the rest of the federal judiciary). We’re one vacancy away — filled with another Scalia, Alito or Roberts — from the Republican cult running the table on the power of corporate America versus everyone else. The absurd decision in the Citizens United case, which has opened the floodgates of political money from the corporate elites for the purchase of elections, and ultimately our democracy, will seem mild in comparison to what could be in store with another ultraconservative justice on the Court.
So, as I said at the beginning, I don’t get it – why are 47-50% of you who work longer and harder than ever, own less than you did before, and have less opportunity to prosper – even considering empowering this cult’s agenda by putting them in office? It’s happened over and over in the past couple of decades – huge swaths of the American working class entranced by the Republican siren song. How do you see going down that road again changing your prospects? Some sage once said “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result…”
Today’s post comes from guest author Tom Domer from The Domer Law Firm. Earlier this month, Mr. Domer was honored by the Workers Injury Law & Advocacy Group (WILG) with a Lifetime Achievement Award for his career representing injured workers.
Last week, we started talking about some of the NCCI’s interesting conclusions about the implications of “Baby Boomers” in the workplace (see Part 1 of this article). In today’s post, we discuss these conclusions in more detail. The frequency of injury has steadily declined since the mid-1990s, with age group differences in frequency largely eliminated. The decline in frequency has occurred for all age groups. The differences among age groups in the early 1990s had almost completely disappeared by 2010.
A longstanding worker’s compensation maxim that “younger workers have much higher injury rates” is no longer true. For example: the injury rate for workers age 55-64 was 16% lower than the frequency for all workers in the mid-1990s but actually 1% higher in 2010, indicating that the differences have clearly narrowed.
Today’s post comes from guest author Tom Domer from The Domer Law Firm. Earlier this month, Mr. Domer was honored by the Workers Injury Law & Advocacy Group (WILG) with a Lifetime Achievement Award for his career representing injured workers.
What is the impact on worker’s compensation from aging Baby Boomers who have postponed their retirement, working much longer than the previous generation? In a recent study by the NCCI (National Council Compensation Insurance) some interesting and surprising conclusions resulted. It is not surprising that the number of older workers is increasing. The study looked at the frequency and severity across age groups and tried to identify factors that accounted for the severity of injuries between older and younger workers.
Among the key findings are the following:
The major difference among age groups occurs between the 25-34 and the 35-44 age groups. All workers 35-64 appeared to have similar costs per worker. These reassuring findings suggest an aging workforce may have a less negative impact on the lost cost per worker than many analysts originally thought.
Many workers’ compensation professionals have the belief that younger workers have a much higher injury rate. That appears not to be true any longer. Differences in frequency by age have virtually disappeared.
The major factor involving older workers involves severity. Older workers tend to have more shoulder rotator cuff claims and knee injuries while younger workers have more back and ankle sprains.
Higher wages for older workers are a key factor leading to higher costs for older workers. On the medical side, more treatment per claim has increased medical costs.
Diagnosis of CRPS is made through process of elimination.
Today’s post comes from guest author Todd Bennett from Rehm, Bennett & Moore.
CRPS cases can be just as complex and complicated as the condition itself. Contact Causey Law Firm for assistance if you, or someone you know, has CRPS and is dealing with an injury or disability claim with the Department of Labor and Industries and/or the Social Security Administration.
Representing clients with chronic pain is both one of the hardest and most rewarding parts of my job.
edema, temperature, or color differences affecting a limb, and
excluding all other causes.
These criteria are vague but, because diagnosis of CRPS is elusive, they are the established criteria for a physician identifying and treating chronic pain that cannot be attributed to any other cause.
When your doctor believes the pain you are experiencing is out of proportion to your examination findings and the severity of your injury, it creates a problem. However, this is quite common when suffering from complex regional pain syndrome. While those who suffer from CRPS are often frurstrated because the exact cause of the pain cannot be proven, the medical literature confirms that this disease, and the resulting pain, is real!
