Archive for August, 2017

Fresh Health Wonk Review & a summer news roundup

Thursday, August 17th, 2017

Fresh Health Wonk Review! Looking for some beach reading? The wonks have you covered. Peggy Salvatore posts The Summer Lull Edition of Health Wonk Review at Health System Ed blog – catch up on what’s been happening in the last few weeks, from autopsies of the ACA repeal to where we go from here and assorted other health topics, the wonks have you covered – check it out.

man reading laptop on a beach

 

More summer reading:

Healthcare reform implications for work comp – Not included in this week’s HWR but a must-read nonetheless, in a two-part series at Managed Care Matters, Joe Paduda breaks down the likely implications for workers comp, Medicaid Expansion and more. Part one is linked above, and here is part 2.

They Got Hurt At Work — Then They Got Deported – Most workers comp laws have upheld workers comp for workers regardless of status: if the employer had the benefit of the labor and the worker is injured, generally comp will pay for those injuries. NPR looks at how that is changing and how some state laws are targeting undocumented workers.

Opt Out is Going to Return, and Why We Should Pay Attention – Think opt out was killed with the OK Supreme Court decision? At Bob’s Cluttered Desk, Bob Wilson talks about why that’s not likely and where the debate is going from here.

WCI 2017 – Miss the recent conference? Here are a few folks who have you covered: WCI has a good conference roundup and Conference Chronicles features good recaps of sessions.

Mourning writer Lizzie Grossman: The Pump Handle readers will miss her – We were sad to learn of Lizzie’s passing, a journalist and blogger who covered important environmental health issues. Her voice will be missed.

Quick Takes

 

In closing, Apparently, robots aren’t quite ready to take our jobs

Medical Care Experts: Where Would We Be Without Them?

Monday, August 7th, 2017

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 often 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.

And why not? Injury frequency continues its 13 year, asymptotic approach to zero. While the same can’t be said for injury severity, these are, nonetheless, heady times for insurers. Kind of hard not to make money when the combined ratio is in the 90s.

Regardless of how good things are getting in workers’ comp world, the workplace is still the best place to control and manage the work injuries and costs that are bound to occur despite frequency’s decline and the rise of the robots. But that requires educated employers who understand that they, not the vendors to whom they outsource payment responsibilities, are the hub of the workers’ comp wheel.  Who approach workers’ compensation in a Management 101 kind of way understanding that a systemic, accountable process will reduce costs to a minimum and bolster profits as well as employee morale and productivity.

This means 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 as soon as possible under medical supervision, seeing that injured workers receive full pay while on modified duty, and measuring success every month just as one measures success in every other business enterprise.

These, and other program components, give enlightened employers a distinctive competitive advantage, and the results will speak for themselves.

But not all employers are enlightened; many have lost their way. Why?

Well, could it be we took a system we had made relatively simple for employers to manage (and let’s not forget that it is employers who ultimately pay the bills) and made it progressively more complicated with progressively more vested interests?

Many middle market employers, realizing they have no hope of navigating the haunted house maze medical care has become, have relinquished control to a myriad of vendors, the “experts.” Climbing this Tower of Babel is beyond them.

The question is: Can we do anything about this? Should we? Or, has this ship long ago sailed?