“What is here?
Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?”
— Timon of Athens by William Shakespeare
Suppose you’re a doctor in California with a patient who complains that his back hurts a lot. Suppose further that Michael Drobot, the owner of California’s Pacific Health Corporation, will give you $15,000 if you refer your patient to his Pacific Hospital of Long Beach for lumbar fusion surgery, which may or may not be warranted. And what if Drobot’s Pacific Hospital were hundreds of miles away and that other qualified hospitals that wouldn’t pay you a kickback were much closer. What would you do?
It is illegal under both California and Federal law to pay doctors for referring patients to hospitals. Yet, according to Andre Birotte, Jr., U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, this is precisely what Drobot was doing on a massive scale in California from 2003 through 2008. The kickbacks amounted to between $20 million and $50 million. That was chump change compared to what Drobot netted from the surgeries. On Friday, Birotte announced that Drobot had pleaded guilty to paying the kickbacks in what amounted to a $500 million dollar fraud conspiracy and now faces up to 10 years in prison.
Drobot began building his health care empire in the mid-1990s. He bought a number of hospitals, but Pacific Hospital was his jewel in the crown. It was his “spine center,” and, according to U.S. Attorney Birotte, it is where doctors, who apparently think the Hippocratic Oath a mere suggestion, would refer patients for questionable lumbar fusion surgery at $15,000 per surgery. That is, unless the referral was for a cervical fusion, in which case the kickback was only $10,000. Needless to say, there were more lumbar fusions.
Workers compensation paid for all of this. More than 150 insurance companies were “ripped off,” according to Eric Weirich, Deputy Commissioner of the California Insurance Department’s Enforcement Branch.
The Los Angeles Times has been covering the Michael Drobot saga for the last 6 years. Drobot’s Pacific Health Corp. got itself out of big trouble in 2012 when it agreed to pay $16.5 million dollars to the government to avoid criminal conspiracy charges. From 2003 to 2008 it recruited homeless people, drove them to one of Pacific Health Corp’s hospitals and then charged Medicare and Medicaid for services never performed. The whole thing makes “ambulance chasing” look like a PBS donor acknowledgement.
But that little traipse into the dark side pales in comparison to the spinal fusion scheme.
In 2012, California SB 863 threatened to put more than a little crimp in Michael Drobot’s hose of money. Up until SB 863, Pacific Health Corp was paid highly inflated prices for both the surgeries and the surgical hardware, because it could charge duplicate invoices for the surgical implant hardware. The provisions of SB 863 would have severely limited duplicate payments beginning 1 January 2013. If Dobrot couldn’t collect the duplicate payments he wouldn’t be able to pay the kickbacks to get the patients he needed to keep the scheme going. He desperately wanted those provisions to be mitigated to some degree. To do that, he needed help.
He got it from friends in high places – the California Legislature. It’s a little murky as to method, but prior to final passage, SB 863 was changed to allow half the duplicate payments to continue, status quo, for all of 2013. The authorities have been looking into this, and U.S. Attorney Birotte has begun to reel in the fish.
The day before he indicted Michael Drobot, Birotte indicted state Senator Ron Calderon and his brother, former Assemblyman Tom Calderon, on 24 charges, including bribery and money laundering. Ron Calderon is alleged to have been paid more than $100,000 in bribes by Michael Drobot and in an FBI sting operation that Calderon thought was a film studio. If convicted, he faces up to 400 years in prison. And that’s the blood in the water that California’s media sharks now circle. Here’s an LA Times infographic of the Calderon family’s tree of connections and alleged corruption.
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However, as that great TV salesman, Ron Popeil, used to say, “But wait! There’s more!”
An FBI affidavit leaked to, of all places, Al Jazeera America, is making life uncomfortable for at least four other legislators, including Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg. Look deeply enough at this and one begins to think that Teapot Dome was nothing more than a benign business deal gone bad. (See the full associated Al Jazeera story: State Compensation Insurance Fund’s lawsuit against Michael Drobot)
Notwithstanding all of this, I keep coming back in my mind to those doctors, those chiropractors, those medical professionals who sold their souls and endangered their patients for all that “yellow, glittering, precious gold.” I ask, “Where is the outrage?” At some point, one hopes that U.S. Attorney Birotte turns his eyes to them.
Archive for the ‘fraud’ Category
Honor Sold, Trust Betrayed: Unbridled Greed in California
Wednesday, February 26th, 2014What’s odd about this picture?
Tuesday, August 13th, 2013Delaine Davis has been sentenced to 4 to 6 years in Wyoming Women’s Center jail. Her crime was workers’ compensation fraud of $11,072. She knowingly collected workers comp benefits while being gainfully employed in another job. In addition to her jail term, she was ordered by Judge Marvin L. Tyler to pay $11,072 in restitution to the State of Wyoming.
Is it just us, or does that penalty seem a little harsh? Perhaps there are some extenuating circumstances that contributed to the sentence that weren’t revealed in news reports. Certainly, we would agree that fraud is bad and should be punished – we have no argument with that. Apparently, Ms. Davis willfully violated the law. She should indeed be required to pay restitution and suffer some punishment for her crime — but 4 to 6 years seems pretty steep to us — particularly in contrast to the “up to 6 month” jail penalty for a willful violation resulting in a worker fatality under OSHA’s general duty clause:
(e) Any employer who willfully violates any standard, rule, or order promulgated pursuant to section 6 of this Act, or of any regulations prescribed pursuant to this Act, and that violation caused death to any employee, shall, upon conviction, be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or by imprisonment for not more than six months, or by both; except that if the conviction is for a violation committed after a first conviction of such person, punishment shall be by a fine of not more than $20,000 or by imprisonment for not more than one year, or by both.
In looking further into the data, we turned up this SHRM article: Report Finds OSHA Resources Lacking, Penalties Weak, which notes that:
“The median penalty for a fatality investigation conducted in FY 2012 was $5,175 for federal OSHA, and the median current penalty for the state OSHA plans combined was $4,200, according to OSHA enforcement data.
Criminal enforcement under the OSH Act has been and remains exceedingly rare, the report said.
Only 84 cases have been prosecuted since 1970, with defendants serving a total of 89 months in prison. During this time there were more than 390,000 workplace fatalities, according to Labor Department data. In FY 2012 13 cases were referred for possible criminal prosecution.”
Fraud is serious business and we all pay the price. Wyoming has chosen to wield a pretty big stick in doling out punishment, noting that “Workers’ compensation is intended to help workers injured on the job, We won’t stand for people who defraud and abuse this important program.” OK. But when it comes to protecting workers and keeping them safe, the state takes less of a hard line and more of a courtesy approach to safety, generally favoring carrots over penalties. This hasn’t produced great results: While there have been some small improvements of late, Wyoming has a pretty ignominious record when it comes to worker fatalities. Except for the most recent year, Wyoming has consistently ranked as the worst or the next-to-the-worst state for worker fatalities over the past decade.
IMEs in a New York Minute
Tuesday, July 23rd, 2013Back in 2009, we blogged an expose from the New York Times concerning the abuse of independent medical exams (IMEs) in New York. The article quoted 79 year old Dr. Hershel Samuels, who performed as many as 50 exams in a day. He filled out a checklist and let others write the reports. Did he read these reports? “I don’t,” he said. “That’s the problem. If I read them all, I’d have them coming out of my ears and I’d never have time to talk to my wife. They want speed and volume. That’s the name of the game.”
Muckraking journalism apparently did not solve New York’s IME problem. Which brings us to orthopedist Michael Katz, who makes a pretty good living performing, among other things, about 1,000 IMEs a year for the state of New York. [Details can be found at the invaluable Workcompcentral (subscription required).] After examining an injured worker, Manuel Bermejo, Dr. Katz wrote up his findings. In testimony, he declared that he spent 10 to 20 minutes with Bermejo. Unfortunately for Dr. Katz, Bermejo secretly recorded the session, which lasted just four seconds shy of 2 minutes.
Tantrum in the Court
When presented evidence of the IME’s duration, Queens Supreme Court Judge Duane Hart went ballistic. “How do I stop carriers from putting people like Dr. Katz on the stand and causing the state to spend thousands and thousands of dollars trying a case and putting a lying witness on the stand?” Judge Hart referred the transcripts of the proceedings to a Queens administrative law judge for potential perjury action against Dr. Katz.
The judge’s rage is understandable: IMEs are a vital activity in workers comp: in theory, IMEs offer a fresh, objective look at a worker’s injuries to determine what, if anything, is wrong, the extent of the disability and the role work played in it. In an ideal world, the IME is dispassionate, with no vested interest in the ultimate determination of compensability.
Good Faith, Bad Faith, No Faith
Dr. Katz claims he has been set up by plaintiff attorneys, who believe he acts primarily to further the interests of insurance carriers. (Here is a link to a plaintiff attorney’s blog featured Dr. Katz and other alleged abusers of IMEs.) On the other hand, there are surely IME doctors who tend to find in favor of injured workers and are thus favored by plaintiff attorneys, .
The world of medicine is supposed to be driven by objective medical evidence, but doctors are hardly robots, evidence is in the eye of the beholder and what the doctor sees might well be influenced by political views, personal history and, yes, even financial considerations.
It is interesting to note that the Bermejo claim began in the workers comp system, where the benefits are limited to lost wages and medical costs. Because the injury involved a fall from heights, the claim also fell under New York’s unique – and understandably unreplicated – Scaffold Law. But the claim now involved literally millions of dollars: Bermejo was suing the hospital where he was treated for malpractice. It is this last suit that brought Dr. Katz into Judge Hart’s courtroom. The judge was hoping for an objective analysis of the claim in order to determine whether the hospital had really screwed up. Alas, he ended up with no faith whatsoever in the quickie IME performed in the proverbial New York minute.
New Hampshire: Are Injured Workers Avoiding Comp?
Thursday, September 6th, 2012The Insider has come across an intriguing but ultimately frustrating study concerning the under-reporting of workers comp claims in New Hampshire. Under the auspices of the NH Department of Health and Human Services, the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System survey (with the unfortunate acronym of BRFSS) conducted phone interviews with nearly 7,000 adults who were employed during 2008. About 340 people – close to 5 percent – reported that they had been injured at work sometime during the prior year – injured, that is, seriously enough to require “medical advice or treatment.” (Sigh, when you include “medical advice,” you might be including the first-aid-only incidents that should be excluded from the study.)
Here is the interesting – if somewhat compromised – nugget from the study. Among those who were injured, only 54 percent reported that their treatment was paid (“all or in part”) by workers compensation. The remaining 46% reported their treatment was paid for by private or government insurance (25%) or by other means (21%). Unfortunately, by the time you get down to the 150 people in the non-comp segment, the combination of small numbers and ambiguous questions seriously reduces our ability to draw any meaningful conclusions. The study may indicate substantial under-reporting, but to know for sure, the researchers are going to have to ask some more questions.
Focus on Comp
Because the survey is conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services, the focus on workers comp is, pardon the expression, almost accidental. In fact, the 2008 survey was the first time they included questions about workplace injuries and payment for related treatment. While I applaud their interest in comp, I hope they would consider adding just a few questions to make the survey more effective. Assuming the survey guarantees anonymity, the questions might include:
– For those reporting that they are self-employed, ask whether they carry workers comp insurance (it is optional in NH).
– For those reporting that they were injured, the follow-up questions should be limited to those who secured outside medical treatment (and not those seeking only “advice”).
– If comp paid just “part” of the treatment cost, who paid the remainder?
– For any worker whose treatment was not covered 100% by workers comp, ask whether they paid anything out of pocket (which would be a violation of comp law).
– If treatment was covered by a non-comp insurer, ask whether workers were instructed by their employer to report the injury as “non-work related” (employers giving this instruction and employees following it are committing insurance fraud).
– For any workers reporting injuries, ask whether they lost time from work due to the injury and whether they were paid for the time they missed. (Some employers are so determined to avoid the comp system, they pay wages for employees missing time due to injury, even beyond the state’s three day waiting period.)
Cost-Shifting?
Lurking in the shadows of this study is the distinct possibility that under-reporting is real and possibly instigated by employers trying to game the experience rating system; they are shifting costs onto forms of insurance that are less loss sensitive. In addition, Injured workers may fear retaliation for reporting legitimate injuries: they may face disciplinary action, may be fired, may be denied overtime or may even ruin the “days without accident” program that dangles the promise of a pizza lunch and drawing for a TV if a certain number of days are free from (reported) injuries.
The BRFSS study provides just enough data to tease us: there may be a serious issue here, but then again, there may be no problem at all. To the good folks in New Hampshire, let this be a word of encouragement. Your study, to put it rather harshly, may be kind of useless in its current form, but with a little tweaking, it might lead to genuine insight into the way injuries are managed in – and possibly diverted from – the state’s workers comp system.
North Carolina’s “ghost workers” allow scofflaws to thrive while by-the-book employers suffer
Tuesday, August 28th, 2012What happens to honest businesses when unscrupulous competitive businesses fail to carry workers’ compensation insurance for their employees? In the difficult economy, some of the honest players have suffered losses while scofflaws thrive. North Carolina’s NewsObserver features an investigative series on Ghost Workers, which takes an in-depth look at the many ramifications of workers’ comp avoidance schemes and the ways that this type of fraud hurts other businesses, the state’s coffers, and any workers who are injured on the job.
- Honest employers are at a 20-30% disadvantage in labor costs that lawbreakers skirt
- State and federal governments lose revenue. For one employee, losses might total $223 in state and federal taxes for a workweek, or about $11,600 a year
- Injured employees can face staggering medical bills with no recourse but litigation
State legislators and candidates in the upcoming state elections are competing to raise the outrage meter in the wake of the NewsObserver‘s revelations that as many as 30,000 employers are failing to carry workers’ compensation insurance. Many of these employers are misclassifying workers as independent contractors, so they are also thumbing their noses at other statutory obligations such as taxes, Social Security, unemployment tax, and overtime pay.
Unsurprisingly to those who have followed the misclassification trail in other states, the construction industry offers a fertile climate for fraud to thrive. The NewsObserver explains how a unique bureaucratic loophole in the state can be worked to game the system:
“A business owner, often in the construction industry, tells his insurance agent that he has no employees. He excludes himself from the policy, which is his right as a sole proprietor. He buys a policy to cover a “ghost,” an unknown employee who might unexpectedly join him to work during the year.
These policies can make a business look like it has more insurance coverage for its workers than it has.”
Tax dodging employers can hide under layers of subcontractors, as well as by hiring illegal immigrants. And state agencies that operate in silos are not coordinating to thwart this practice.
Not all the employers are small operations – the expose talks about a firm named Martin’s Bricklaying, which supplied 76,000 hours of labor to help build the $125 million Wake County Detention Center, earning $1,066,538 for this work.
“The company’s owner, Sabas Martin Galeana, has run afoul of state and federal tax obligations in years past, court records show; he settled the last of three liens in 2009. A review of several employees’ recent pay stubs shows that Martin has failed to withhold state and federal taxes as recently as July. The workers say he didn’t provide his workers the tax forms they needed to settle their own obligations.”
The practice of employee misclassification isn’t unique and it’s hardly surprising. But what is surprising is that North Carolina is so slow off the mark when other states and the federal government have been taking aggressive steps to curb misclassification and to penalize scofflaws. We’ve been covering stories of states getting tough on misclassification and workers comp avoidance since 2004. We wonder how the heads of various agencies in North Carolina never noticed. The state has faced serious budget cuts to valued services in recent years, all the while bleeding much needed tax revenue to lawbreakers. Kudos to the NewsObserver for their series.
North Carolina legislators will be working to plug this hole – particularly since it’s an election year. They may also want to sign on to federal efforts such as the
Deparment of Labor’s Misclassification Initiative. Thirteen states have signed Memorandum of Understanding (MOUs) with the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, and in some cases, with its Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA), Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), and the Office of the Solicitor. The DOL says that these MOUs, “will enable the Department to share information and to coordinate enforcement efforts with participating states in order to level the playing field for law-abiding employers and to ensure that employees receive the protections to which they are entitled under federal and state law. Employers that misclassify their employees may not be paying the proper overtime compensation, FICA and Unemployment Insurances taxes, or workers’ compensation premiums.”
Doggone fraudster of the month
Tuesday, July 17th, 2012Fraud of any flavor is to be decried, but somehow it bothers us just that much more when the perpetrator is a physician. Call us sentimentalists, but we like to think of the Hippocratic oath as more than just a quaint mythic tradition. You know, the “do no harm” thing. But with the proliferation of prescription pain pill abuse, addiction, and deaths, it’s inevitable that some physicians are involved. We happened to spy a recent news story about the bust of a California pill mill.
Police had complaints that Dr. Rolando Lodevico Atiga of Glendora was essentially selling prescriptions for strong painkillers, such as oxycodone and Vicodin. Atiga was already on probation from prior charges related to fraudulent activity. Undercover agents went to obtain proof by trying to obtain fraudulent prescriptions. At one point, Atiga asked the officer for proof that she suffered from pain. How conscientious!
“This undercover officer obtained X-rays of her dog, brought these X-rays into the office, showed the doctor,” Staab said. “He looked at these X-rays, immediately said that pain medicine for her would be warranted and for $400 immediately issued a prescription for hydrocodone. Either Sparky the dog really, really badly needs Percocet or this doctor is a petty drug dealer masquerading as a physician,” Staab said.”
Now the dog x-ray angle of this story is pretty humorous, but there is nothing whatsoever that is funny about the underlying issue. Propelled by an increase in prescription narcotic overdoses, drug deaths now outnumber traffic fatalities in U.S.. When you think about druglords and pushers, doctors are probably not the image that comes to mind … but as the prescription drug problem worsens, that may change.
Risk Transfer as Three-Card Monte
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012When you’re looking for ethically-challenged business practices, Florida is usually a good place to begin. The latest kerfluffle involves a toxic combination of very high deductibles for workers comp insurance and employee leasing companies. Oklahoma based Park Avenue Property and Casualty Insurance sold policies with deductibles as high as $1 million to PEOs. Think about that for a moment: a million dollar deductible is virtually self-insurance, as very few claims break that formidable barrier. Park Avenue, along with its successor companies, sold these policies to employee leasing companies, who in turn passed the coverage through to their client companies. With such a huge deductible, the coverage must have been relatively inexpensive compared to standard market rates.
Under large deductible programs, the insurance company pays all the bills and then seeks reimbursement from the client company, up to the deductible amount. It’s not hard to figure out the flaw in this business model: client companies will welcome the discounted premiums, but when it comes time to pay back the insurer for paid losses, they will be unable to cut the checks. Given the complete absence of regulatory-mandated collateralization for the claims liability, there is no way the insurer will be reimbursed for large loss claims.
That’s where the three-card Monte comes in: the insurer wrote these policies knowing full well that the deductibles would never be paid. That’s why Park Avenue morphed into Pegasus Insurance, which morphed into Southern Eagle Insurance, which flies off into the pastel sunset of bankruptcy.
Gaming Risk Transfer
The cards have been moved around at blinding speed, but who ends up paying? Once again, those who played by the rules will have to pay for those who didn’t. (For a more egregious example of punishing the innocent, see our blogs on the New York Trusts.) Policy holders in Florida will be charged somewhere between 2% and 3.5% of premiums to cover the $100 million plus of losses.
In the WorkComp Central article by Jim Sams (subscription required), Paul Hughes, CEO of Risk Transfer Company, which markets insurance to PEOs, complains that singling out the PEO industry is unfair. The state should never have allowed Park Avenue and its winged successors to write insurance, as they were clearly incapable of assuming the risk. True enough, but even Hughes would have to admit that the PEO industry offered a ripe venue for the scam: individually, PEO clients would never have qualified for high deductible coverage, but somehow, under the collective umbrella of a PEO, they did.
Meanwhile, PEOs are being sued for failing to reimburse the claims payments of Park Avenue and its successors. After the PEOs lose these cases, they will seek payment from their clients, who are unlikely to have the ability to pay anywhere near what is owed. The litigation will go on for a long time, but the bottom line is simple: risk transfer cannot exist where none of the parties can cover the exposure. That isn’t risk transfer: it’s a shell game, where those who did not play are left holding the bag.
Follow Up – June 7, 2012
After posting this blog, I received a call from Paul Hughes, CEO of Risk Transfer in Florida, who is quoted above. While not contesting the premise that large deductibles are poorly managed in Florida (and elsewhere), he believes that I unfairly singled out PEOs in the blog. The fundamental issue is the failure of the state to adequately regulate and oversee large deductible programs. I agree.
Please take a few moments to read Paul’s response, which employs the useful metaphor of a casino for the risk transfer industry:
The core issue to me is the role of the regulator versus the business owner in the management of the “casino” (insurance marketplace). That is one of the parts of Jon’s article in Workers Comp Insider that blurs the line a bit on what the PEO’s role is within the casino and whose job it is to set the rules. The casino is the State as they certify the dealers to play workers’ compensation (Carriers, MGU’s, MGA’s, Agents and Brokers) and the State also certifies that the players are credible (not convicted of insurance fraud) and can pay/play by the rules of the house. The rules are set by the house and the games all require public filings – ability to write workers’ compensation (certificate of authority), ability to offer a large deductible plan (large deductible filings), agent license, agency license, adjusters license and any other deviation from usual business practices (like the allegations that one now defunct insurance carrier illegally charged surplus notes to desperate PEO’s in the hardest market the industry has ever seen). The “three-card monte” that Jon alludes to in this article is managed not by the dealers (carriers), but by the house (state). Would a real life casino consider it prudent to allow one of their dealers to expose 20% of their $5m in surplus through high deductibles sold to PEO’s with minimal financial underwriting and inadequate collateralization? Would any casino write harder to place (severity-driven) clients to include USL&H, roofers etc with the minimum amount of surplus needed to even operate a carrier…? Of course not. These “big boy” bets would never be allowed in Vegas without the pockets being deep enough to cover the losses.
Pennsylvania: Crime Wave in a Bureaucracy
Wednesday, March 21st, 2012The Insider does not normally think of state workers comp insurance funds as hubs of criminal activity, but then again, we haven’t been to Scranton lately. James McDonnell, 53, is a supervisor in the State Workers’ Insurance Fund (SWIF). He makes about $51,000 a year – at least, that’s his declared income. He has apparently been pulling in a whole lot more than that. He was arrested this week for running a kickback scheme involving premium discounts for Pennsylvania employers. In exchange for (undocumented) discounts in premiums owed, McDonnell secured cash kickbacks of one third to one half the discount. Between 1999 and 2011, McDonnell and his wife pulled in at least $80,000.
WorkCompCentral (subscription required) offers additional background on this case, including PDFs of the criminal indictment. McDonnell offered premium discounts to individual employers, in one case, a roofer, whose premiums, instead of going up $50K, came down $10K. He then insisted that the roofer join one of the three staffing firms with whom he did business. In exchange for steering clients their way, these firms paid McDonnell a relatively modest 1% commission, in addition to paying him substantial cash kickbacks on the premium discounts. In honor of family values, McDonnell’s wife was given several jobs which apparently did not require that she perform any work.
Kickbacks and Harassment
McDonnell must have been a busy man, systematically exploiting his position with SWIF, but he allegedly found time to harass a fellow fund employee. Last September he was accused of “making sexual advances on the employee, identified only as Jane Doe, such as asking her to lick a piece of Twizzlers candy taken from her work desk before he ate it and telling her to bend over and pick up a time sheet he dropped to the ground.” Would you be shocked to learn that the fund did not take these accusations seriously?
There may well be slow days at a typical state fund, but McDonnell sure knew how to make time fly. That skill will come in handy when and if he finds himself doing time in a bureaucracy of a different sort altogether.
Comp fraud takes many forms and encompasses opportunities for each and every stakeholder in the system: doctors, lawyers, insurers, state bureaucrats, business people, workers and, I suppose, even consultants. Today’s little saga of greed arises from the midst of a state bureaucracy. But no matter where the crime originates, the result is the same: higher costs for the vast majority of people who play by the rules.
A Window Into Fraud
Monday, February 13th, 2012A couple of years ago we blogged the performance incentive program at Smurfit-Stone Container Corporation in California. The performance numbers were stellar, but not necessarily because the work was performed safely. Instead, the company conspired with local medical providers to secure limited treatment outside of the workers comp system. Two supervisors pled no contest in conspiring to deny comp benefits to injured workers.
With the recent conviction of chiropractor Robert Schreiner, we see into the black box of the conspiracy. Workers complaining of work-related problems were referred to doctors like Schreiner – giving rise, alas, to a new and ominous definition of provider network. In one instance a worker complained about a neck and shoulder injury. Schreiner denied that the problem was work related, saying that it was caused by carrying a back pack as a child. He provided a handful of treatments and then encouraged the worker to file the claim under his health plan to continue treatments. When the worker persisted and filed a comp claim, he was fired.
Schreiner is headed to jail to serve a mostly symbolic sentence of 30 days, to be followed by three years of probation. Perhaps he can provide some adjustments to his fellow inmates. Confined spaces sure can mess up the spine.
Faking Safety
Smurfit-Stone was bought out last year by RockTenn. You can still read about the company in Wikipedia. Here is the (unattributed) description of the company’s safety program:
Smurfit-Stone has been an industry leader in safety performance since 2001 [NOTE: the conspiracy to under-report claims began in 1999!]. In 2007, Smurfit-Stone’s U.S. operations had an OSHA recordable case rate of 1.05, the best in company and industry history. This represents an 84 percent improvement in the company’s recordable case rate since the implementation of Smurfit-Stone’s SAFE process in 1995.The SAFE process, which stands for Smurfit-Stone Accident-Free Environment, promotes five core beliefs:
1.All injuries are preventable
2.Safety is everyone’s responsibility
3.Working safely is a condition of employment
4.Training employees to work safely is essential
5.Safety is good business
As litigation has proven, Smurfit-Stone’s low OSHA case rate has less to do with safety than with a conspiracy to under-report claims. Perhaps the SAFE program stood for something else: Screw All Forsaken Employees. Aggressive safety goals are a good business practice; circumventing the workers comp system is not just a bad practice, it’s illegal. Just ask Robert Schreiber.
