If you’ve been following the blog-o-sphere and the LinkedIn-o-sphere, you know that the space is crowded. Lots of workers comp practitioners have glommed on to the idea that the way to get ahead is to write and post frequently. Connect with more than 500 others in the profession. Write something, anything, put your name on it and throw it up against the wall to see if anything sticks. Kind of the way Garrison Keillor used to say he changed socks on a book tour.
Every once in a while, something helpful and interesting appears and gains a bit of temporary caché for itself and for its author. Mostly, the topics center on the persistent rise in medical costs and, even more often, on the insidious and, some would say, criminal use of opioids, which a regrettable number of alleged doctors, having checked their Hippocratic Oath at the door, are prescribing at a hell-bent-for-leather rate at a hell-bent-for-leather profit. The poor, unfortunate souls for whom these scripts are written are nothing more than high-cost collateral damage.
Consequently, efforts to control workers compensation costs are now almost entirely dedicated to reining in costs associated with medical care with a huge emphasis on prescription drugs.
My colleagues and I have always believed (and, I add, have time and again been proven right) that the workplace is the best place to control and manage work injuries and costs. That, in order to do that, employers need to be educated so that they understand that they, not the vendors to whom they outsource payment responsibilities, are the hub of the workers comp wheel. In the mid 1990s, at the height of the worst workers comp crisis ever to hit the market, this hypothesis became fact. Our clients, as well as the clients of a number of our competitors, overcame the workers comp troubles of the day because they learned that treating workers compensation in a Management 101 kind of way reduces costs to a minimum and goes a long way toward bolstering profits as well as employee morale and productivity. This meant training supervisors in the proper response to work injuries, keeping close communication with injured workers, creating good relationships with treating physicians, bringing injured workers back to work under medical supervision, seeing that injured workers received full pay while on modified duty, and measuring success every month just as they measured success in every other business enterprise. These, and other program components, gave these enlightened employers a distinctive competitive advantage, and the results spoke for themselves.
Something has happened between then and now. I think of it as the “workers compensation dark ages.” There are still enlightened employers, but many have lost their way. We took a system that we had made relatively simple for employers to manage (and let’s not forget that it is employers who ultimately pay the bills) and we made it progressively more complicated. We made medical care into a haunted house maze that only experts can navigate (hence, the rise of medical experts). Employers, suddenly realizing that they are now the south bound end of a north bound mule, have relinquished control to a myriad of vendors, the “experts.” Not all employers, of course. Large, sophisticated organizations with well-oiled risk management departments, have not lost the focus, although they have to work harder to stay the course.
So, like Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
The question is: What are we going to do about it? Could it be that the way forward is by way of the way back?
Tags: employers
