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August 24, 2011

The collapse of a trench at a construction site that caused the death of a worker is a reminder of the importance of not cutting corners with safety regulations on the job.

August 24, 2011 /24-7PressRelease/ — Worker Accidents Show the Importance of Following NY Safety Regulations

In November 2010, 27-year-old construction worker Eric Chinchilla was working at a home renovation project site in Greenwich, Connecticut when the walls surrounding the trench in which he was working suddenly gave way, leaving Chinchilla pinned underneath a concrete slab. Despite the fact rescue personnel rushed to the scene, Chinchilla died at the scene from his crush injuries.

Firefighters had to use wooden planks to secure the remaining walls of the trench to try to reach Chinchilla and fire officials said that it was clear that the walls were not properly secured. OSHA initially fined Sosa Construction, Chinchilla’s employer, $17,000 for five safety violations stemming from the incident causing Chinchilla’s death, including failure to have the employees wear protective head gear on a job site. After OSHA representatives met with people from the company, OSHA reduced the fine to $8,700.

Robert Kowalski, director if the Bridgeport, Connecticut OSHA office, reported that Chinchilla’s death is one of 16 workplace fatalities that his office investigated in 2010. Kowalski said that was an unusually high number of deaths for his office to investigate; a more typical year would only entail five or six investigations of fatalities.

According to Kowalski, workplace accidents tend to fall into one of four categories: falls, electrocution, objects striking people or people being stuck between objects. Kowalski classified Chinchilla’s death in the “person being stuck between objects” category.

The high number of workplace accidents that Kowalski’s office has investigated in 2010 highlights the importance of following workplace safety guidelines. Under the Occupational Safety & Health Act of 1970, employers have a responsibility to provide workplaces for their employees that are free from dangerous conditions likely to cause death or serious injury, and to follow the safety standards that OSHA establishes. OSHA provides industry-specific standards for construction work, agriculture, maritime work and general industry. If a worker believes that his or her employer is not following OSHA standards for the employer’s industry, the worker has the right to have OSHA come and inspect the workplace.

Failure to provide a safe workplace leads to serious injury and, in some cases, death. If you have been injured at work due to unsafe conditions do not hesitate to contact a workers’ compensation attorney who can discuss your situation with you.

Firefighters raced to 111 Devonshire St. in downtown Boston to investigate reports that the building was leaning. But Deputy Fire Chief Richard DiBenedetto said the building had always looked that way.

by Melissa Maynard, Stateline staff writer

WASHINGTON, D.C.
August 22, 2011 7:11am

 

Montana has long had a workers’ comp problem. Its labor force is injured far more frequently and at greater expense to employers than is typical around the country. Part of that stems from the jobs people do in Montana — drilling for oil and working in mines. But part of it has been the system itself. A prominent national study, released last fall, singled out Montana’s as the most expensive workers’ compensation system in the United States — with premiums 163 percent higher than the national median.

 

“We had businesses just up and walking across the border to Idaho and North Dakota,” says state Representative Scott Reichner, the sponsor of an overhaul package that was signed into law in April. “It was killing us. Lawyers push the envelope and make the system looser and looser and next thing you know we’re covering everybody for everything.”

 

In March, the Montana Supreme Court upheld a Workers’ Compensation Court award involving a man who smoked marijuana on the job at a tourist attraction before feeding — and subsequently being mauled by — a grizzly bear. The state is footing approximately $35,000 in medical bills because, in the words of the court, bears are “equal opportunity maulers,” even though the decision to smoke pot around them was “ill-advised to say the least and mind-bogglingly stupid to say the most.”

 

Since the Montana system was revised in April, however, the effects have been dramatic. Insurers in the state have lowered premiums by 20 percent, and a further reduction of 10 to 15 percent is expected within the next five years. The new law shortens the period in which workers can receive medical benefits, and specifies which doctors they can see and how well those doctors are compensated. If an employee is injured on a break while away from the workplace, the employer is no longer likely to be on the hook for lost wages and medical expenses.

 

State workers’ comp systems in America have little in common. “Workers’ compensation is a state-run program with no federal standards and almost no federal involvement,” says John Burton, a professor emeritus at Rutgers University who has studied the subject for more than 40 years. “There’s an enormous amount of variation in who is eligible and the level and type of health care that must be provided.”

 

Mr. Burton chaired the National Commission on State Workmen’s Compensation Laws in the early 1970s, which concluded that federal standards might be necessary. Many states increased benefits for injured workers in the years that followed in the hopes of fending off federal intervention.

 

But since the 1990s, states have been moving in the other direction — tightening eligibility in response to rising medical costs. This year, legislatures in Illinois, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Kansas and Washington State, like the one in Montana, made significant changes aimed at cutting costs and demonstrating a more business-friendly climate. “It’s not that if you’re in the system, you’ve seen a weekly benefit cut,” Mr. Burton says. “It’s that many states have made it harder to get any benefits at all.”

 

Every state but Texas requires employers to provide some workers’ comp insurance for their employees, and many large companies self-insure, paying injured workers themselves according to the standards in state law. In Ohio, North Dakota, Washington and Wyoming, the only alternative to self-insurance is to enroll in a state-run plan. About 20 other states allow employers to either enroll in a state plan or carry private insurance. In the remaining states, purchasing insurance through a private carrier is the only option other than self-insurance.

 

Montana’s legislation was widely supported but involved significant compromise from labor, doctors, lawyers, business groups and insurance companies. “When you bring a consensus team together, if at the end of the day all sides are squealing like they’ve been bit by a dog, then you know you’ve got it just about right,” Gov. Brian Schweitzer said in an interview with Stateline.

 

The governor was himself among the squealers. Mr. Schweitzer, a Democrat, was never fully comfortable with eliminating ongoing “permanent partial” benefits for workers with certain minor injuries. He vetoed a provision that would have excluded tips from workers’ income calculations for wage replacement. Still, when all was said and done, Mr. Schweitzer reports, “I said ‘Eureka!’ We’ve got it.”

 

Some of Montana’s most significant and controversial changes pertain to the way medicine is practiced. Medical benefits are now capped at five years except when extensions are granted by a review panel of doctors. The idea is that 90 percent of injured workers reach “maximum medical improvement” within five years and shouldn’t be able to rely on workers’ comp as their primary form of medical care indefinitely. The 10 percent who require ongoing care related to their injuries may go before a medical review board to argue for two-year extensions.

 

Doctors and hospitals are seeing their medical fee schedules frozen, and are being asked to follow uniform treatment guidelines and file additional paperwork. Injured workers are limited in their choice of physician; insurance companies can refer them to a doctor of the company’s choosing if they disapprove of the original selection.

 

Some doctors say they felt they were being attacked by legislators during the process. “I am personally offended by the concept that we somehow drive this,” Chris Mack, a neurosurgeon from Missoula, told legislators in one heated exchange. The impression is that “we order inappropriate tests, we ask patients to come and see us, and we schedule them for routine visits so that we can bill.” Mr. Mack says none of this was the case.

 

While Montana was changing its law, Illinois was reducing medical fee schedules for doctors and hospitals and changing a number of standards and processes after a bizarre set of scandals and circumstance gave the issue a boost in political momentum.

 

The CEO of industrial manufacturer Caterpillar, a major Illinois employer, cited high workers’ comp costs in a widely publicized letter to the governor in which he threatened to take his firm out of the state. National rankings called out the Illinois system as the third most expensive in the country. And then a scandal broke at Menard Correctional Facility, where more than half of all workers have claimed an on-the-job injury, costing the state almost $10 million in payouts over the last three years.

 

Many of the workers in question have said that repeatedly unlocking cell doors has caused carpal tunnel syndrome, a claim that arbitrators have often rewarded with large payouts. Capping awards for carpal tunnel was among the changes in this year’s legislation. “That scandal kept bubbling in the papers for months and months, and ultimately succeeded in moving workers’ compensation from the back burner to the front burner and keeping it there,” says Peter Burton, of the National Council on Compensation Insurance.

 

Oklahoma completely rewrote its workers’ comp law this legislative session, in part to the benefit of workers. Changes were geared toward lowering costs but also toward getting legitimate medical claims approved more quickly, says state Representative Daniel Sullivan, the bill’s sponsor. Medical care that follows treatment guidelines can move forward now with less of a hassle for injured workers. In the past, an employer or insurance carrier in Oklahoma could delay access to any medical procedure by challenging the need for care in Workers’ Compensation Court.

 

“We’re trying to eliminate some of the unnecessary aggravation in the system for everyone involved,” Mr. Sullivan says.

 

Other changes relate to the qualifications of independent medical examiners, whose determinations are used by the Workers’ Compensation Court to make decisions about contested claims. Those examiners are now required to be medical doctors or doctors of osteopathy, and to specialize in the injuries they are diagnosing. Before, says Mr. Sullivan, “We had chiropractors writing reports on psychological overlay and opining on things they knew nothing about.”

 

 

Stateline is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news service of the Pew Center on the States. Since 1999, it has reported and analyzed trends in state policy.

 

http://www.centralvalleybusinesstimes.com/stories/001/?ID=19166

Copyright:	(c) 2011 A.M. Best Company, Inc.
Source:	A.M. Best Company, Inc.
Wordcount:	374

 

Insolvent self-insured workers’ compensation trusts in New York state left behind $924.7 million in liabilities, a far deeper hole than earlier estimates, according to a recent report.

Determination of the current level of deficits of the 17 defaulted group trusts is the result of an analysis of most recently audited financial statements, according to a report from the state Workers’ Compensation Board. The board acted in response to a new state law requiring it to conduct semi-annual reports on the insolvent trusts.

The legislation is an outgrowth of a dispute between the state and a company it accuses of fraud and mismanaging eight of the trusts The board filed a lawsuit against Compensation Risk Managers LLC and CRM Holdings in New York Supreme Court in Albany. In the lawsuit, which seeks at least $405 million in damages, the board alleges CRM mismanaged several self-insured workers’ comp trusts (Best’s News Service, May 14, 2010).

CRM provides fee-based management and other services for workers’ compensation self-insured groups through its operating companies, with domestic headquarters in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Last year, the Nasdaq Stock Market delisted the company, which had been trading under $1 a share, for not meeting minimum Nasdaq guidelines (Best’s News Service, May 14, 2010).

The total sought from CRM and affiliated entities and individuals is $472 million, according to the board’s report. The workers’ compensation board is also taking legal action against the Hamilton Wharton Group, from whom it is seeking $33 million.

Attempts to reach the Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office or Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office for comment were not immediately successful.

CRM Holdings’ primary insurance subsidiary, California-based Majestic Insurance Co., recently completed a rehabilitation plan that required the company to transfer its liabilities and certain assets to AmTrust Financial Services Inc. (Best’s News Service, July 12, 2011). The completion came three months after the California Department of Insurance seized the company and placed it into conservatorship, citing insufficient surplus levels.

Now that the deal has been finalized, AmTrust will assume responsibility for Majestic’s policyholder claims. Majestic, which was licensed to write workers’ compensation and property/casualty policies in 17 states prior to being placed into conservatorship, will be administered by AmTrust’s subsidiary Technology Insurance Co.

http://insurancenewsnet.com/article.aspx?id=273675

According to an AP story over the weekend, the medical records of some 300,000 Californians who had applied for California workers’ compensation benefits were discovered to be unwittingly left exposed on a publicly accessible web site.

Apparently, the information was placed on an internal web site by Southern California Medical-Legal Consultants, a California company that represents medical providers in the recovery of billing from workers’ compensation insurance carriers. The AP story stated that the information, which included people’s names and social security numbers as well as details about their medical condition, was not encrypted, didn’t require a password for it to be accessed, nor were search engines kept from indexing the web pages where the information resided.

Since the company thought the information could only be accessed by its employees and it wasn’t linked to any of the company’s public web site pages, no one thought much about it. That was until, as described in a company press release dated the 12th of June:

“The company was notified of the possible breach by a data security firm that discovered some of the files using a sophisticated, automated search of Google indexes.”

However, the person at the above mentioned data security firm – Aaron Titus of Identity Finder – told the AP that what he did was not very sophisticated at all, and that the information was:

“… available to anyone in the world with half a brain and access to Google.”

Mr. Titus also likened the breach to a “… case of felony stupidity.”

Ouch.

The basic issue raised in the AP story is that the IT security knowledge/skills of many organizations involved in the capture, storage, analysis and/or communication of electronic medical information has not generally kept up with the evolving security threat, and the situation doesn’t look like it is going to get any better any time soon. As a New York Times article in May noted, the “personal medical records of at least 7.8 million people have been improperly exposed” over the past two years.

The Times article noted that inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services “… had found dozens of vulnerabilities in systems to protect records of patients at seven large hospitals in New York, California, Illinois, Texas, Massachusetts, Georgia and Missouri. Auditors cited such problems as personal information that was not encrypted and was stored on computers that could be easily used by unauthorized users.”

That “improperly exposed” number is expected to rise – possibly significantly – as electronic medical records become more widely used across the US. A recurring question has been whether the 165,000 or so small physician offices in the US that have fewer than 10 employees including the doctor(s) will be able to internally acquire or pay for the IT security skills needed to keep their electronic medical record systems safe, not only now but also against future threats. Given, as the Times article indicates, that hospitals with far more IT resources are having a hard time with IT security, the answer doesn’t look promising.

Security questions are also being raised about Australia’s proposed AU$466 million national electronic health record system. According to a story over the weekend in The Australian, nearly half of Australians may end up “boycotting the voluntary system when it launches in July next year amid concerns the government may find it impossible to guarantee private medical details remain private.”

Supporters of the new national EHR system are confident that it will indeed adequately protect a patient’s medical information, but also agree that the Australian government has to become more active in convincing citizens of that fact. How can this be done?

According to The Australian story, just remind people, says Melbourne GP Mukesh Haikerwal, who heads the Clinical Leadership team for the National E-Health Transition Authority and is Chair of the World Medical Association, that the new system:

“… is much safer than having a fax hanging around the GP surgery that’s just come from the clap clinic.”

Does that happen a lot in GP surgeries in Australia?

Of course, inadvertent data breaches aren’t confined to the medical arena either. Just a week ago, Yale University announced that personal information including the names and Social Security numbers of 43,000 people who mostly worked for Yale in 1999 were accessible via Google search for the past 10 months.

As described in a Yale Daily News article from last week,

“The information was stored on a file transfer protocol (FTP) server used primarily for open source materials… In September 2010, Google modified its search engine to be capable of finding and indexing FTP servers… but ITS [Information Technology Services] was not aware of this change. … since discovering that the file was accessible, ITS has confirmed that other search engines, such as Yahoo!, do not index FTP servers.”

I don’t know whether Mr. Titus would describe Yale’s case as one of “felony stupidity” too, but it does point out that personal data can be exposed in many, ever-changing ways even experienced IT organizations may not fully be aware of.

Photo: iStockphoto