At the WCIRB Annual Meeting, President and CEO Bill Mudge talked about the history of California Workers’ Compensation and the concerns for the future. The session started with a review of the history of California workers’ compensation. Due to a combination of unintended consequences of legislation and case law, carrier combined ratios skyrocket during the late 1990s, eventually reaching over 180% in 2000. The biggest culprit in this was the “presumption of correctness by treating physician” which had the unintended consequence of causing medical costs on claims to increase rapidly as unscrupulous physicians were virtually unlimited in what they could
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At the 2019 WCIRB Annual Conference, Dave Bellusci, WCIRB Executive Vice President and Chief Actuary talked about the status of the California workers’ compensation system. Some key talking points were: Total premiums in California have dropped since 2017 after 7 straight years of increase. There are $15.7 billion in premiums forecast for 2019. Employer payroll growth has been offset by declining premium rates which has resulted in the overall premium declines. The top 10 carriers currently write around 50% of the marketplace. This is the least concentrated the market has been in years. National carriers write the bulk of the
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Mark Walls (Vice President – Communications & Strategic Analysis, Safety National) and Kimberly George (Senior Vice President – Corporate Development/M&A/Healthcare, Sedgwick) were joined by the following panel of public risk managers at the 2019 PRIMA Annual Conference to discuss trending topics and challenges in industry workers’ compensation. Jonathan Hall (Executive Director, Garden State Municipal Joint Insurance Fund) Anne-Marie Sharpe (Director – Risk Management, City of Miami) Dawn Watkins (Director – Integrated Disability Management, Los Angeles Unified Public School District) Presumption Laws Anne-Marie shared that in her organization, employment physicals can be critical to manage presumption related cases. Jonathan talked through
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Ariel Jenkins (Director – Risk Control, Safety National), Randy Jacoby (Senior Risk Management Consultant, Midlands), and Dax Salmon (Litigation Case Manager, OSS Law Enforcement Advisors) presented this session on confronting the reality of police-resident contacts, clarifying responsibility, and highlighting best practices regarding safety and risk management for all involved at the 2019 PRIMA Annual Conference. There is a long list of stakeholders in these seemingly small interactions which elevates the visibility and ultimately impact to communities and the national conversation on this topic. Ariel shared that as law-abiding citizens, we have an obligation to make sure law enforcement does not
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This session presented by James Curbeam, CPCU, ARM, AIC (Risk Manager, Las Vegas Valley Water District) and Lisa Kremer (Strategic Risk Practice Leader, Marsh Risk Consulting) at the 2019 PRIMA Annual Conference discussed transitioning from a traditional risk management program to an enterprise approach when evaluating the risks of an organization. Lisa began this session explaining what ERM is. The goal of an enterprise-wide risk management initiative is to create, project, and enhance stakeholders value by managing the uncertainties that could influence achieving the organization’s objectives. Lisa encouraged the approach of building upon the traditional risk management program into a
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At the 2019 NCSI Annual Meeting, Doug Holmes from Strategic Services on Unemployment & Workers’ Compensation (UWC) talked about how workers’ compensation factors into the “Medicare for All” push. Is “Medicare for All” a serious possibility? It does poll well with the public and it is a focus of the Democratic Party including all of their Presidential candidates. So yes, this is an issue that needs to be taken seriously. There are two “Medicare for All” bills in Congress right now. S 1129 was introduced in April by Bernie Sanders. The bill states that “no employee benefit plan may provide
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At the 2019 National Council of Self Insurers  Annual Meeting a panel discussed managing chronic pain without medications. The speakers were: Mark Pew – Preferred Medical Geralyn Datz, PhD. – Southern Behavioral Medicine Associates Becky Curtis – Take Courage Coaching Pain is your body’s reaction to a stimuli. One way to alter that reaction is with the use of medications that can mask the pain. However, these medications have a wide range of bad side effects and your body eventually develops a tolerance making them less effective. Mental health plays a tremendous role in pain and unfortunately this is often
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At the 2019 National Council of Self Insurers Annual Meeting, Joe Paduda from Health Strategy Associates discussed how changes in the healthcare marketplace are impacting the price of medical services in workers’ compensation Over half of all medical costs for workers’ compensation go to facilities. This includes hospital inpatient and outpatient services, and physician charges from facilities. The total workers’ compensation medical spend in the United States is less than 1% of the total healthcare spend. This means that workers’ compensation has very little influence on the drivers in the healthcare system. As big as we think we are, we
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This collaborative session presented by Sarah Perry, ARM-P (Risk Manager, City of Columbia, MO) and Kathy Peeling, CPCU, ARM-P (Assistant Director for Risk Managment, University of Maryland) at the 2019 PRIMA Annual Conference engaged the audience in a discussion on high-frequency claimants. Kathy led the group through identifying why frequent claims happen to a few people. Sarah then offered ideas on communicating claim frequency to entity managers and strategies to mitigate these circumstances. Who are the Repeaters? How will you define accident repeaters? Kathy suggests a combination of defining how many accidents during a specified period and using data including
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At the 2019 NCCI Annual Issues Symposium, Dr John Howard, Director of the National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety, talked about emerging technology that will impact worker health and safety. Robotics have advanced so that they can perform three basic tasks. Sensing which is done through interpretation of data from environmental sensors. Thinking is done thought use of forms of artificial intelligence. Acting is done through effectors for the robots. Robots have superior performance to human workers when it comes to mundane, repetitive and precise jobs. They can also do the job cheaper than humans. Sensor technology is expanding
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