Cavalcade of Risk – The Terrorism, CyberWar, Floods, Bad Mortgages, Robberies, Investment Losses and Disease Edition of Cavalcade of Risk is hot off the press and posted by Jaan Sidorov at Disease Management Care Blog. Check it out!
Tribute to Workers – A few weeks ago, we made a 9/11 memorial post, which focused heavily on the event, the aftermath, and the losses. More recently, we came upon an excellent New York Times feature that focuses on portraits and stories of workers who are rebuilding the World Trade Center, the largest construction project in the United States. It’s a positive testament to the future, to resilience, and to some great American workers. The rebuilding effort has employed 3,200 workers. NYT features more about the WTC rebuilding project.
Student Athletes? – Jared Wade posts about how the NCAA Has Used the Term “Student-Athlete” to Avoid Paying Workers Comp Liabilities – part of a longer article that The Atlantic featured on college sports. Wade notes that, “For our purposes, however, the most interesting excerpt chronicles the how and the why of the NCAA’s creation and widespread promotion of the term “student-athlete.” According to Branch, the main reason that former NCAA head Walter Byers, in his own words, “crafted the term student-athlete” and soon made sure it was “embedded in all NCAA rules and interpretations” was because it was an excellent defense against being held liable for workers compensation benefits that those injured in athletic competition could seek.”
Prescription Drugs – NCCI has issued Workers Compensation Prescription Drug Study: 2011 UPDATE (PDF), a 31 page report. The key findings:
*The indicated Rx share of total medical is 19%; this is slightly higher than the estimate given in our 2010 update
*OxyContin climbs from the number 3 WC drug in Service Year 2008 to number 1 in Service Year 2009
*Hydrocodone-Acetaminophen drops from the top WC drug in Service Year 2008 to number 3 in Service Year 2009
*Recent overall cost increases are driven more by utilization increases than by price increases
*Physician dispensing continues to increase in Service Year 2009 in almost every state
*Increased physician dispensing is associated with increased drug costs per claim *Per-claim Rx costs vary significantly by state
At Managed Care Matters, Joe Paduda offers his educated observations on the pharmacy study.
Agricultural worker protections – Laura Walter of EHS Today writes about A Disposable Work Force: Farm Worker Advocates Push for Agricultural Worker Protections. Her article focuses on a new report published by the advocacy organization Farmworker Justice which criticizes the H-2A temporary guest work visa program. The report claims that it makes agricultural workers vulnerable to poor working conditions. Farm worker advocates argue that to improve these conditions, foreign agricultural workers should be able to seek legal immigration status.
Battle of the giants – In catching up on a backlog of blog reading, we find a post from Roberto Ceniceros’ Comp Time of great interest. It focuses on the battle of the giants chronicling the ongoing dispute between two workers’ comp behemoths, AIG and Liberty Mutual. The dispute is being fought in court, and now in the court of public opinion via dueling websites.
Hunt for misclassification is getting muscle – The Department of Labor and the IRS will be teaming up with other federal agencies and the labor departments of 11 states to share information that will help to track down employers that misclassify workers. For more on this, see Jon Gelman’s post, US Dept of Labor Moves Aggressively on Misclassification of Employees and Dave DePaolo’s post One Way to ID Scofflaw Employers: IRS Co Op
Social Media – The more we use Twitter, the more we like it – we’ve certainly come across some great users and learned about some great pointers and links to breaking news. One Twitter user we’ve found particularly helpful is Kyle Thill posting for @ToyotaEquipment, a forklift dealership from Minneapolis. With 15,000+ followers, he must be doing something right! Safety is one of the ongoing themes of his posts, so if that’s of interest to you, he’s a good Twitter user to follow. He also issues The #Safety Daily Update, which is a curated “newspaper” of web-related safety matters. It’s worth checking out.
Signs of life for the elusive hard market – At Terms + Conditions, Claire Wilkinson talks about an uptick in commercial insurance prices as reported by Tower Watson’s latest commercial lines pricing survey.
Administrative note – We’ve shut down comments due to an unbelievable flood of comment spam. We’re sorry about that – but we don’t have the time to deal with it. If we come up with any new magical solutions to curtail it (we’ve tried many) we may reinstate comments at a later time.
Posts Tagged ‘NCAA’
Risk roundup, student athletes, pharma report, misclassification, war of the giants & more
Wednesday, September 21st, 2011Injured Jocks and Medical Costs
Monday, July 20th, 2009College athletics is big business. While athletes are not paid for their efforts (well, some are), they can reap substantial benefits while pursuing glory on the playing fields of their Alma Maters. But athletes, like workers, are prone to injuries. And once injured, they may find themselves liable for the cost of medical treatment. There is no workers comp for injured athletes, but perhaps there ought to be.
Kristina Peterson writes in the New York Times that athletes are often stuck with the medical bills for sport injuries. Students may have coverage through their parents’s insurance policies, but these often exclude varsity sports, limit out-of-state treatment or do not cover much of the bill. Schools may offer supplemental plans, but these vary greatly. Athletes who play for major Division I schools often benefit from robust coverage. Big Ten athletes rarely have to pay for medical treatment. The NCAA offers catastrophic insurance for all athletes, but coverage begins at $90,000. An athlete would run through an awful lot of treatment to reach that level of medical billing.
Even in the Big Ten, where insurance coverage is robust, stuff happens. Jason Whitehead played football at The Ohio State University. He was badly injured during a practice and was airlifted to a hospital.
“The next day, when I woke up, the doctor came in and informed me that surgery went well, but this was a career-ending injury…It took a while to sink in.”
Whitehead lost his scholorship one year after the injury. He also ended up with $1,800 in medical bills not covered by his father’s insurance or by the school’s. The school valued Jason as an athlete; as an ordinary student, well, he ended up pretty much on his own.
Rowing to Oblivion
As in workers comp, medical coverage for student athletes is complicated by factors that may or may not be directly related to the injury. Erin Knauer went out for the crew team as a freshman walk-on at Colgate University. She had a cold when she took a five kilometer workout test on rowing machines. On pace for the fastest time, she suddenly felt a shooting pain beginning in her back and reaching her toes.
She eventually was diagnosed with postviral myositis, a muscular inflammation that causes weakness and pain. Colgate officials determined that this was an illness, not an injury, so financial responsibility fell to Knauer. She tapped out her student health policy at $25,000, leaving her $55,000 in debt. She is currently working two jobs and paying down the bills at the rate of $250 a month.
There is little doubt that Knauer’s illness was exacerbated, if not caused, by the strenuous workout. If this had been a work-related situation, comp would likely have picked up the entire tab (plus indemnity). But as a student athlete, Knauer has no guarantee of coverage. She wanted to row for the glory of Colgate. She ended up in serious pain and serious debt. Glorious it was not.
College athletics often involve a fundamental trade off: in return for playing sports, athletes benefit from a low-cost or virtually free education. That might be a pretty good deal, except when the sport results in a life-changing injury. As David Dranove, a professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, puts it: “It makes no more sense to tell the athletes, “You go buy your own health insurance,” than it does to say, “You go buy your own plane tickets and uniform.'”
The rationale for mandatory insurance for athletes is similar to the rationale for workers comp. The schools benefit from the labors of their athletes. The least they can do is pay for any and all medical treatment required to make these athletes whole.
