Today’s post was shared by Jon L Gelman and comes from workers-compensation.blogspot.com
Today’s post was shared by NIOSH Transportation and comes from www.cnbc.com
The federal government thinks long-haul truckers like Bryan Spoon need more rest.
But with the Department of Transportation’s new rules forcing drivers to take longer breaks and cut back on hours behind the wheel, Spoon thinks the government has created a solution looking for a problem.
“I wish the government would just quit trying to fix something that’s not broken,” he said on a recent rest stop in Columbia, Mo., after hauling a load of construction materials on the 48-foot Great Dane flatbed behind his 2009 Volvo 780.
“If I get any more breaks out here I won’t be able to make a living,” he said.
Starting Monday, drivers like Spooner will have to stick to a schedule that requires taking a 30-minute break in the first eight hours of driving, cut the maximum workweek to 70 hours from 82, and “restart” those 70 hours with a 34-hour break once a week.
The rules are part of a program by the Obama administration to make U.S. highways safer by reducing the number of truck accidents and fatalities. The program also includes a safety rating system that shippers can review when they chose a new carrier, with the goal of prodding the trucking industry to further improve the safety of its drivers and equipment.
“The updated hours of service rule makes three common sense, data-driven changes to increase safety on our roadways and reduce driver fatigue, a leading factor in large truck crashes,” said…
Today’s post was shared by Jon L Gelman and comes from workers-compensation.blogspot.com
Today’s post was shared by Jon L Gelman and comes from www.nytimes.com
HERE is a symbol of China’s assault on the American economy: the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which connects Brooklyn and Staten Island. This landmark, which opened in 1964, is North America’s longest suspension bridge. It’s also in urgent need of renovation. Unfortunately, $34 million in steel production and fabrication work has been outsourced to China.
How did this happen? The Metropolitan Transportation Authority says a Chinese fabricator was picked because the two American companies approached for the project lacked the manufacturing space, special equipment and financial capacity to do the job. But the United Steelworkers claims it quickly found two other American bridge fabricators, within 100 miles of New York City, that could do the job.
The real problem with this deal is that it doesn’t take into account all of the additional costs that buying “Made in China” brings to the American table. In fact, this failure to consider all costs is the same problem we as consumers face every time we choose a Chinese-made product on price alone — a price that is invariably cheaper.
Consider the safety issue: a scary one, indeed, because China has a very well-deserved reputation for producing inferior and often dangerous products. Such products are as diverse as lead-filled toys, sulfurous drywall, pet food spiked with melamine and heparin tainted with oversulfated…
Today’s post was shared by Jon L Gelman and comes from workers-compensation.blogspot.com
The Affordable Care Act continues to generate controversy. There are obviously many paths to the same destination. Today’s post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from tv.msnbc.com
(Photo by David Kohl/AP)
President Barack Obama speaks at the AFL-CIO Labor Day picnic at Coney Island in Cincinnati Sept. 7, 2009. Some labor unions that initially backed Obama’s health care overhaul are now frustrated and angry about what they say are unexpected consequences of the plan that could hurt their members.
“Repeal and replace” is the Grand Old Party’s oft-repeated mantra regarding Obamacare, which House Republicans voted to repeal for the 40th time on Friday. But in April, an organization in the president’s base echoed the refrain.
On April 24, the United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers, and Allied Workers released a statement demanding “repeal or complete reform of the Affordable Care Act.” While no other union has yet called for an outright repeal of the health care law, a growing number of them argue that serious reform is needed.
“We continue to stand behind real health care reform, but the law as it stands will hurt millions of Americans including the members of our respective unions,” wrote the presidents of three major labor unions in a July letter to Congressional Democratic leadership. The subsequent three and a half weeks have not assuaged their fears.
Today’s post was shared by Jon L Gelman and comes from thehealthcareblog.com
By David Do, MD
Earlier this month officials at Oregon Health Sciences University discovered that residents in several departments were storing patient information on Google Drive, and had been doing so for the past two years. Given They treated this discovery as a breach of privacy and notified 3000 patients about the incident.
While I don’t condone the storage of patient information on unapproved services like Gmail or Google Drive, this incident pretty much highlights the sorry state of information systems within the hospital and the unfulfilled need by physicians for tools that facilitate workflow and patient care.
It says something that the Oregon residents felt compelled to take such a drastic action. I don’t know what punishment – if any – those responsible were given by administrators for their “crimes.” I’ll leave it to readers to make up their own minds about the wisdom of the unauthorized workaround and the appropriateness of any punishment. But I do know that the message the incident sends is a very clear one.
We’re screwing this up. There is really no earthly reason why it should be any more difficult to share a patient record than it is to share a Word doc, a Powerpoint or yes, even a cloud-based Google Drive spreadsheet.
Why the Breach Happened
What’s going on here? Let’s say I admit a patient to the hospital. Our…
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.
Fourth & Vine Building – in the shadow of the Space Needle!
After TWENTY YEARS in our Pioneer Square office, Causey Law Firm is MOVING!
The office will be closed on Friday, May 31st and will reopen in our new location as of 1:00 pm on Monday, June 3rd. Time loss compensation will be processed on both dates.
Our mailing address, e-mail addresses, phone numbers and fax number will all remain the same. Located on the corner of 4th & Vine in the Belltown neighborhood, our physical address will be:
2601 4th Avenue, Suite 340, Seattle, WA.
Our new location offers convenient access with a load zone for quick stops and plentiful metered parking. Two conference rooms and individual offices will make for comfortable meetings.
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.
The Washington State Labor Council posted the following in their Legislative Update newsletter on March 29, 2013. We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. Please contact your legislators and share your story (or your parent’s or sibling’s or friend’s story) of your experience with the workers’ compensation system. Urge your legislator to hold off on approving any more “reforms” until the impact of the last round of “reforms” is fully realized.
Stay on top of the issues that effect Washington workers. Check out the Washington State Labor Council’s Legislative Tracker™ for updates on many of the key bills of concern to the WSLC and its affiliated unions. Read the latest news at TheStand.org, WSLC’s online newsletter.
FRIDAY, MARCH 29, 2013
4 Reasons Why Our Current Workers’ Compensation System WORKS
OLYMPIA — One of the first legislative priorities of the State Senate’s Republicans-Plus-Two Coalition was to pass bills that undermine Washington State’s safety net for middle-class families: our unique — and popular — workers’ compensation system. SBs 5112, 5127 and 5128 all grant employers more control over injured workers and/or seek to “cut costs” by reducing benefits injured workers receive. And all three are based on the myth that our state-run workers’ compensation system is costly and overly generous. It is neither.
It is unique. Washington is the only state where workers share in the system’s costs, is one of only a handful of states that does not allow private workers’ compensation coverage, and is the only state that bases rates on exposure to risk (hours on the job) as opposed to wages, so premiums don’t automatically go up as wages rise.
It is popular. Advocates for the above-mentioned Senate bills — conservative legislators, corporate lobbying groups and sympathetic newspaper editorial boards — also support privatizing our workers’ comp system. But in 2010, their initiative to do this failed miserably, by an 18-point margin, and was rejected by voters in every county in the state — east and west of the mountains. That didn’t stop Republican Rob McKenna from vowing to privatize the system in his campaign for governor. He lost.
The Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO urges legislators to REJECT all efforts to undermine the workers’ compensation safety net for injured workers. Please OPPOSE Senate Bills 5112, 5127 and 5128. No more “reforms” until we see how the changes currently being implemented are working!
Here are four reasons why our system works as it stands and legislators should reject SBs 5112, 5127, 5128 and any other attempts to undermine this middle-class safety net:
1. Premium costs are shared
Washington is the only state where workers pay a share of the costs of workers’ compensation coverage — between 25% and 30%. Workers pay half the cost of the fund that pays medical expenses for workers who suffer job-related injuries or illnesses and half the cost of the fund that partially replaces lost wages when workers are unable to work due to their injury or illness. Our workers’ compensation system is truly of, by and for the workers.
2. Recessions (not benefits) raise rates
An objective look at the history of workers’ compensation rate increases shows that rate increases happen during and immediately after recessions. There is no evidence that rate increases are related to increased benefits or pensions. In fact, rate increases from the Great Recession of 2008-10 were actually lower than those caused by previous recessions, despite the fact that this most recent recession was long and deep, and employment levels have yet to fully recover.
In addition, in 2007 — the year before the recession hit — Gov. Chris Gregoire granted a rate decrease of 2% and a 6-month “rate holiday” where employers and workers paid nothing for the medical portion of their insurance. If not for those poorly timed rate cuts, the subsequent 2008-11 recession-generated rate increases would have been even lower. The 2007 rate cuts cost the system $315 million, or the 2007 equivalent of a 35% rate decrease. By comparison, the 12% rate increase in 2011 brought in $196 million.
Despite all this, and despite continuing medical cost inflation, our workers’ compensation system has had an actual average rate increase of ZERO in both 2012 and 2013.
3. Employer costs are competitive
The Oregon Department of Consumer and Business Services conducts a biannual state-by-state study of workers’ comp premiums that is widely cited not only among public policy experts and state labor agencies across the nation, but also by private insurance professionals. The latest edition, published in October 2012, found that Washington State had the 13th highest overall premiums in the nation.
But the news is actually better for employers here because Washington is the only state where workers pay a portion of the premiums. When that fact and the cost of supplemental pensions are factored in — which the Oregon study does not — Washington ranks 22nd in the nation. So, right in the middle.
Proponents for cutting workers’ compensation benefits don’t like to talk about the actual evidence that our rates are competitive. Instead of talking about employers’ costs, they focus on injured workers’ benefits, noting that our state has the 2nd highest benefits per $100 of payroll, according to the latest report from the National Academy of Social Insurance.
But in Washington’s case, higher benefits don’t mean higher costs. Our state-run workers’ compensation system — one of only five such systems remaining in the U.S. — is viewed as a national model for its efficiency. It can afford good benefits while charging competitive premiums because there are no profit margins, commissions or brokerage fees, as there are in privatized systems. It has significantly lower claims administration costs and no marketing or advertising costs. Voters overwhelmingly rejected the 2010 privatization initiative and its false promises of lower costs because they recognized this and value this state-run institution.
4. 2011 changes are saving $1.5 billion
In 2011, the Legislature approved changes to the workers’ compensation system. The Department of Labor & Industries estimates that savings from those changes are beating expectations, with the state now projected to save $1.5 billion over four years, $200 million higher than originally estimated. And these changes have not even been fully implemented yet.
The Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO urges legislators to REJECT all efforts to undermine the workers’ compensation safety net for injured workers. Please OPPOSE Senate Bills 5112, 5127 and 5128. No more “reforms” until we see how the changes currently being implemented are working!
Retrain injured workers… don’t cut them off
And let’s also remember that these decisions affect real people who have suffered real injuries and illnesses that change their lives — and affect their entire family’s well-being.
The Washington Department of Labor and Industries reports that a Pierce County couple will pay nearly $23,000 in restitution and fines after pleading guilty to charges that they continued to employ workers in their Spanaway, WA towing business after the state had prohibited them from doing so. In 2011, the Department of Labor & Industries revoked the certificate of industrial insurance for A1 Towing Service after owners Sandra and Billie Rouse failed to pay for workers’ compensation insurance for their employees.
L&I’s Fraud Prevention and Compliance Program assessed $24.6 million in unpaid employer premiums plus penalties in fiscal year 2012.
According to court documents, the Rouses allegedly told a revenue agent they were continuing to operate the business without employees. However, an L&I investigator determined that several employees were continuing to work for the business. While observing the business over a period of time, the investigator saw employees using company trucks to pick up and deliver various vehicles, including vehicles at the scene of accidents.
The Rouses both appeared in Pierce County Superior Court last week and entered guilty pleas to a Class C felony for engaging in business after the certificate of coverage had been revoked. In addition to the restitution and fines, Billie Rouse was sentenced to a 30-day jail term which was converted to 240 hours of community service.
L&I’s Fraud Prevention and Compliance Program assessed $24.6 million in unpaid employer premiums plus penalties in fiscal year 2012. The program brings in nearly $9.30 for every dollar spent to fight fraud. More information is available at www.Lni.wa.gov/Main/Fraud.
Today’s post comes from guest author Tom Domer from The Domer Law Firm.
Access to health insurance is under attack. President’s Obama’s comprehensive health care reform law, intended to increase health care coverage for millions of Americans, faced extreme scrutiny by the U.S. Supreme Court last week. Congressman Paul Ryan’s federal budget plan is a cynical and careless proposal that would slash Medicaid programs, while providing tax cuts for the wealthy. In Wisconsin, Governor Walker and his fellow Republicans also propose gutting funds to the state’s vital Medicaid program. The ultimate goal is hard to deny: certain politicians and interest groups actually want a country with more uninsured citizens. The personal toll on the uninsured is devastating, especially for those dealing with work injuries.
Access to health insurance alters this equation. If the worker had adequate access to health insurance, especially Medicaid, he could obtain the medical care that could allow a return to work, regardless of whether the worker’s compensation insurer accepted or denied the claim.
Today’s post was shared by NIOSH Transportation and comes from www.cnbc.com
Earlier this month officials at Oregon Health Sciences University discovered that residents in several departments were storing patient information on Google Drive, and had been doing so for the past two years. Given They treated this discovery as a breach of privacy and notified 3000 patients about the incident.
