The courtroom was impassioned, to say the least, and downright angry at what they were hearing. In our post-COVID-19 reality, the claimant in a workers’ compensation case was presenting lengthy testimony by video. The judge sat calmly as the claimant spoke about a seemingly horrific injury.
Workers compensation insurers in Texas reported nearly 100,000 COVID-19 claims and 472 fatalities between March 2020 and April of this year, and more than half of both involved first responders and correctional officers, according to new data made public by the Texas Department of Insurance, Division of Workers’ Compensation.
In recent inspections conducted by the U.S. Department of Labor, unsafe working conditions were once again discovered at Dollar General and Dolgencorp discount stores across multiple states.
Workforce positive marijuana test results after accidents have reached a 25-year high, according to the recently published results of the Quest Diagnostics Drug Testing Index.
Injured workers often feel lost in the complex workers’ compensation benefit delivery systems. Difficult to understand, these systems leave injured workers confused, disbelieved and disrespected, which feeds a sense of hopelessness and abandonment. This can potentially contribute to the development or instigation of chronic pain perceptions and a poor outcome.
Inflation, supply chain issues, increased catastrophic losses from climate change, and higher and higher nuclear verdicts mean that insurance carriers are facing higher loss costs and loss ratios to their premium dollar.
Susan Shemanski leads a team responsible for managing the safety of 70,000 workers across 6,000 U.S. job sites. Fatigue is perhaps the most pressing worker health issues on her mind, and one she emphasized at this year’s RISKWORLD in Atlanta during her session, ‘The Future of Workplace Safety: A Case Study.’
One week before their May 1st presentation at RIMS’ 2023 RISKWORLD event in Atlanta, Ike Jenkins and Marc Vincent updated their slides with the latest figures on U.S. mass shootings. By the time they’d checked into their hotels, the figures were already outdated.
The six states where courts or legislatures have said insurers must reimburse for medical marijuana for injured workers have yet to provide guidance on how to do so, putting payers in the position of not being able to use the federal banking system to cover costs for a federally illegal substance.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the use of drugs or alcohol at work significantly increases the the risk of workplace accidents. With this in mind, sooner or later every major employer will inevitably need to address a workers’ compensation claim involving some kind of intoxication.
Claimant fraud and premium fraud are two of the most well-known types of workers compensation fraud. In these cases, a worker may intentionally fake an injury (claimant fraud) or a business owner may misrepresent their employee headcount or incorrectly classify employees to obtain lower insurance premiums. Now, a lesser-known type is occurring with greater frequency: provider fraud.
Medicare’s federal funds assist in covering a wide range of healthcare costs for adults age 65 and older, as well as for younger persons with specific needs and applicable benefits.
Mental illness touches the lives of many in our society, whether personally or through a friend, family member or colleague. Data from the Center for Disease Control shows that one in five Americans will experience a mental illness during a given year.
After years of tightening limits, new federal guidelines are giving doctors greater leeway in prescribing opioids. Unveiled in November by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the voluntary guidelines update more restrictive advice issued in 2016 -- advice that triggered a regulatory crackdown on opioids at the state and federal level.
Four more people have been found dead following a chocolate factory explosion in West Reading, Pennsylvania, last week, raising the death toll to seven, officials said Sunday night. All previously missing persons had been accounted for as of Sunday night.
