Posts Tagged ‘horseplay’

Health Wonk Review, Worker Memorial Day, OK, Obesity, Appendectomies & more

Thursday, April 26th, 2012

Health Wonk Review – Jennifer Salopek and Sarah Sonies have posted Health Wonk Review: Shiny Happy (Mostly) Edition, an excellent hosting debut at Wing of Zock, a blog sponsored by the Association of American Medical Colleges for practitioners of academic medicine. Make sure you click through to learn the origins of the fanciful name of the blog.
April 28 is Worker Memorial Day – an event dedicated to remembering those who died on the job from workplace injuries and diseases. It’s also a time to commit to doing better, to renew efforts for safe workplaces. The National Council for Occupational Safety & Health has a list of Workers Memorial Day events throughout the country, as well as fact sheets and resources in both English and Spanish.
Oklahoma decides against “alternative workers comp” – Last week, the Oklahoma Senate gave the nod to a bill that would allow some employers to opt out of workers comp system by offering a comparable alternative, but the OK House rejected the opt-out measure. Last week, Senator Harry Coates had issued an editorial discussing the opposition viewpoint: Be careful what you ask for. See Dave DePaolo’s take on OK’s non-subscription model and the recent Walmart opt out in Texas.
Is it OK to discriminate against obese people? – In what may be a first among hospital hiring restrictions, Victoria Hospital in Texas has stated they won’t hire very obese workers. HR pro Suzanne Lucas (also known as “Evil HR Lady”) asks if it is okay to discriminate against obese people, offering 5 reasons why she feels it is a bad policy. In addition to potential illegality, another issue she raises is that many health professionals consider the BMI or Body Mass Index a faulty indicator of health. The first link quotes a physician as noting that “A professional football player might have a body mass index of 32, which is technically obese, but only have 7 percent body fat.” (Be sure to check out the Flickr gallery of real people and their BMIs that Lucas links.) Now whether or not this is the wrong “solution,” the fact that obesity is a workplace problem is not at issue. A new Cornell study says that obesity accounts for almost 21% of U.S. healthcare costs, and “An obese person incurs medical costs that are $2,741 higher (in 2005 dollars) than if they were not obese.”
Usual and customary? – How much will an appendectomy cost you in a California hospital? It might depend on your insurance coverage. In one hospital, the cheapest procedure was $7,504 and the highest cost in the same hospital was $171,696. See more in Merrill Goozner’s post on the Anatomy of A Walletectomy.
Jail time for scofflaws/ – Jon Gelman notes that North Carolina is raising the stakes for employers that don’t carry workers comp – “the first contempt hearing is scheduled for May 22 when 125 uninsured employers have been noticed to appear in court.” The state says pay up or go to jail.
Sex, workers comp & horseplay – Joe Paduda posts about compensable sex on the road, an Australia case where a worker was injured while in flagrante delicto. My colleague discussed this case previously in his post Compensable Sex, Down Under? We don’t get to talk about sex very often on this blog, although there was a spanking incident a number of years ago (sadly the link to the news item appears broken.) The spanking post dealt with an instance of horseplay – an issue that Cassandra Roberts poss about at LexisNexis in her post A Roll In the Hay: Delaware’s Horseplay Defense and Australia’s Sex Romp Case Revisited, where she lists an array of quirky cases in which the horseplay defense failed.
More Noteworthy News

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Health Wonk Review and a news roundup

Thursday, January 20th, 2011

It’s deja vu all over again at Managed Care Matters, where Joe Paduda hosts commentary on the rematch of the healthcare reform debate in this week’s Health Wonk Review: Repeal, replace, renew, revise, revisit – what the bloggers say. It’s a great issue with good contributions and diverse opinions on the matter. Check it out!
The skinny on fat – As a follow-on to my colleague’s post on the not-so-hidden-cost of obesity earlier in the week, we offer this visualization – the obesity map from the CDC, which shows the dramatic rise in obesity rates from 1985 through 2009. You can also see a state-by-state breakdown of obesity rates.
Underwriting front and center – Dan Reynolds of Risk & Insurance does a great job of outlining just how much of an underwriter’s nightmare workers comp has become and looking at how much worse it could get – and why. Chad Hemenway of PropertyCasualty360 (formerly known as National Underwriter) reports on a recent presentation by Insurance Information Institute’s Bob Hartwig who says that the industry is at a tipping point, and underwriting will be the driving force in profit or loss for 2011.
Horseplay ruling At Business Insurance, Roberto Ceniceros reports on a recent Virginia high court ruling which allocated benefits to a worker injured during horseplay. The injured employee was a victim, not the perpetrator, of the horseplay. “The state high court also relied on a theory of recovery, which has found that joking actions of co-workers are a risk of employment because humans are playful and from time to time engage in pranks, which can be dangerous.”
Aging & Workers Comp – Working Safer or Just Working Longer? – new study by California’s Commission on Health and Safety and Workers’ Compensation. The report contains a lot of interesting information and notes that “Interestingly, despite the large increases in the fraction of workers 55+, the impact of the aging workforce on expected workers’ compensation costs is modest. Frequency and duration effects partially offset each other and older workers still represent a minority of all workers. The aging workforce will increase workers’ compensation costs only about 2% as of 2030 above the cost if the distribution of workers by age had remained the same as 2000.”
And about those seniors… – Jon Gelman posts about a push to put a cap on workers comp for federal workers based on age. According to Senator Susan Collins, “At the U.S. Postal Service, for example, 1,000 employees currently receiving federal workers’ compensation benefits are 80 years or older. Incredibly, 132 of these individuals are 90 and older and there are three who are 98.” Gelman’s post includes links to states and counties who are also looking at this issue.
OSHA – OSHA’s Top 10 Safety Violations for 2010 – In 2010 OSHA issued over 94,000 safety-related citations for violations. OSHA stated that nearly half of the total violations were accounted for by the top 10 safety violations.

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You say it’s your birthday?

Tuesday, January 6th, 2004

…and those spankings from co-workers left you feeling a little bruised? Generally spanking, birthday spanking rituals in the workplace are not a good idea.

Well you’ll get no relief from the tort system, at least not in Minnesota where the Appeals Court invoked exclusive remedy as the only potential avenue of relief. It will be interesting to see if this passes the compensability test. Usually horseplay isn’t compensable, but it can often hinge on whether the employer has a policy discouraging any horseplay, or whether they actually condone or even participate in any tomfoolery. If the company president was among the paddlers, it may prove to be an expensive birthday party indeed.

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