Posts Tagged ‘WTC’

Selfie Edition of Health Wonk Review; 9-11 Remembrance

Friday, September 11th, 2015

hwr

It’s the Health Wonk Review Selfie Edition! Kicking off the back-to-school season, our health wonkers have their collective noses to the grindstone. Steve Anderson has an excellent Selfie Edition of Health Wonk Review posted at medicareresources.org blog. It includes a great roundup of posts running the gamut from new medical technologies to developments in the Affordable Care Act, a look back at Medicare on its 50 year anniversary, and much more. It’s a robust kickoff for the new season – check it out.

In other news, on this date, we remember 9/11

Our condolences to all who lost loved ones on 9-11, with a particular tribute to the many heroic 9-11 first responders – both those who lost their lives, and those who continue to suffer today with the mental and physical after-effects.

A few weeks ago, we saw the passing of Marcy Borders, a 9/11 survivor who was captured in a riveting photo that became iconic of the tragedy. She was on the 81st floor of the WTC North Tower when the plane struck. Borders was 42 years old at her death – she died of cancer.

Writing about Borders and the high incidence of 9-11 related cancers, Mollie Reilly of Huffington Post notes:

“The number of cancer cases linked to Sept. 11 has grown in recent years. As of May 2015, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported more than 4,000 first responders, rescue workers and survivors who have been diagnosed with cancer linked to the attacks. According to the CDC, skin cancer, prostate cancer and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma are among the most common illnesses among those individuals.”

For a graphic and sobering account of living with the legacy of having experienced the toxic chemical cloud of 9/11, see Michael McAuliff’s first-hand report: September 11 Toxic Dust: Deciphering My Pocketful Of Terror

Related:

Our thoughts also turn to the many in our industry who lost their lives while doing their jobs. Marsh lost 293 colleagues and 63 consultants and Aon lost 176 colleagues. Astounding still today. Hug a colleague in their memory. Be kind to those around you.

Robert Hartwig and Claire Wilkinson of the Insurance Information Institute have produced some reports on the impact of 9/11 on the insurance industry.

Health Wonk Review: September 11, 2014; plus, a 9-11 remembrance

Thursday, September 11th, 2014

David Williams posts the first issue of the fall season at Health Business Blog – Health Wonk Review: September 11, 2014. Topics include Obamacare, Medicare, performance measurement, power plants and more…

And speaking of 9/11…
Our condolences to all who lost loved ones on 9-11 — our thoughts particularly go to the many heroic 9-11 first responders – both those who lost their lives, and those who continue to suffer today with the mental and physical after-effects.

Our thoughts also gravitate to the many in our industry who lost their lives while doing their jobs. Marsh lost 293 colleagues and 63 consultants and Aon lost 176 colleagues. Astounding still today. Hug a colleague in their memory. Be kind to those around you.

Robert Hartwig and Claire Wilkinson of the Insurance Information Institute have produced some reports on the impact of 9/11 on the insurance industry – as well as the documented need for renewal of a terrorism insurance backstop.

Terrorism and Insurance: 13 Years After 9/11 The Threat of Terrorist Attack Remains Real
The 20 most costly terrorist acts by insured property losses
Terrorism Risk: A Constant Threat – 2014 – download the report here

Risk roundup, student athletes, pharma report, misclassification, war of the giants & more

Wednesday, September 21st, 2011

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.

10 Years After 9/11 – insurance reflections and more

Monday, September 12th, 2011

First responders and oral histories
We are mindful that the 9-11 story was one that largely affected ordinary people who were going about their workdays. When the planes hit, thousands of first responders jumped into action and their courage and quick actions helped to save untold thousands. Among the many remembrances and stories in the10-year commemorative events, we found the 60 Minutes story on the experiences of first responders to be particularly powerful. It focused on 911 Responders Remember, an oral history project initiated by Dr. Benjamin Luft, director of the Long Island World Trade Center Program (the SUNY-Stony Brook arm of the WTC Medical Monitoring and Treatment Program consortium). This Center of Excellence provides service and monitoring to approximately 5,000 WTC responders across Long Island. These men and women are law enforcement officers, construction workers, electricians, emergency medical personnel, firefighters, iron workers, plumbers, dog handlers, doctors, and many others.
In addition to cancer, respiratory and pulmonary disorders and other physical problems, many workers still suffer from varying levels of emotional or psychological distress, including PTSD. This project is a national historical record, a public health document, and for many participants, a therapeutic exercise which allows them to open up to tell about events or things that they witnessed that they may not previously been able to talked about.

See more testimonies.
Related: A decade later, the list of Sept. 11 victims continues to grow
Related: Fight Over Compensation for 9/11 Responders Shifts to Cancer Victims.
Hitting close to home
September 11 took an extremely heavy toll on the insurance industry. The terrible events claimed the lives of 295 employees of Marsh & McLennan and 176 employees at Aon Corporation. Dave Lenckus of Business Insurance offers recollections from insurance executives who were connected with or escaped from the WTC in his article Terror of September 11 lives in memory. Also see the company tribute pages: Remember: September 11, 2001 – a site to remember and celebrate the lives of those Aon employees lost on September 11, 2001, and Marsh & McLennan 9/11 Memorial – both a website and a physical memorial.
Tribute song & Firefighter Foundation
After 9/11, our own Tom Lynch recorded a 9/11 Tribute Song with Peter Clemente at Mechanics Hall in Worcester, MA. Actor and comedian Denis Leary used the song to raise money for the New York fallen firefighters. Leary is very devoted to firefighters and runs the Leary Firefighters Foundation. The Foundation was established in 2000 in response to a tragic fire in Worcester, Massachusetts that claimed the lives of Leary’s cousin, a childhood friend, and four other firefighters. The Leary Firefighters Foundation’s mission is to provide funding and resources for Fire Departments to obtain the best available equipment, technology and training. Inadequate equipment – particularly faulty tracking and radio equipment – contributed to deaths in both events.
Insurance media coverage
PropertyCasualty360: 9/11: 10 Years Later, Execs & Risk Managers Weigh In on How Industry Has Changed
Insurance Journal: 9/11 and Terrorism Risk 10 Years Later and Why 9-11 Changed Everything
Risk & Insurance: Selling Carriers on Rebuilding Ground Zero
Risk Management Monitor: Ten Years After
Occupational Health & Safety: NFPA Cites Safety Improvements Rising from 9/11
CNNTech: How 9/11 inspired a new era of robotics
workerscompensation.com: 9/11 Tribute
Other resources
Understanding 9-11: A Television News Archive – a library of news coverage of the events of 9/11/2001 and their aftermath as presented by U.S. and international broadcasters. A resource for scholars, journalists, and the public, it presents one week of news broadcasts for study, research and analysis.
The Encyclopedia of 9/11 – from New York Magazine
The September 11 Digital Archive

Health Wonk Review and other workers comp news notes

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

Joe Paduda is the man of the moment. His Managed Care Matters blog is worth a regular perusal for the informed commentary he offers about the medical side of workers comp. Today, there’s twice as much reason to visit because he’s the host of this week’s Health Wonk Review, in which the focus is on implementing health care reform. Check out this biweekly best of the health policy blogosphere!
Violence on the job – This week, The Hartford Courant posts that the total work comp payout for the shooting at Hartford Distributors could set a record. The company’s workers’ compensation insurer is The Hanover Insurance Group. Reporter Matthew Sturdevant notes that families of deceased and injured workers have one year from the Aug. 3 shooting to file workers’ compensation claims and discusses state benefit levels. (See our related posting from last week about the aftermath of the shooting in Connecticut. )
In another corner of the world, other workers were homicide victims. The New York Times offers a tribute to 10 medical workers who were killed while on a mission to provide aid to remote Afghanistan villages that generally don’t have access to medical care. Workers included 6 U.S. medical personnel and humanitarian workers, one German, one Briton and two Afghans.
Volunteer firefighter case – The Chicago Tribune reports on a recent Iowa court finding in a dispute between two insurers which ruled that a volunteer firefighter must be officially summoned to duty to be covered by workers’ comp. Justin Fauer died while trying to rescue his boss from a manure pit. In addition to being a farm worker at the farm where he died, Fauer was also a volunteer firefighter. According to the report, “The farm’s insurance company, Grinnell Mutual Reinsurance Company, paid the claim but sought for it to be shared by the fire department’s company, Traveler’s Insurance Company, claiming Fauer also responded as a firefighter.” The Iowa Supreme Court upheld a district court decision that “…a volunteer firefighter cannot be summoned to duty by circumstances, but can only be summoned by the fire department or some other official channel.”
Deadline reminder to 9-11 recovery workersGround Zero workers must register by September 13 of this year to be eligible for future worker’s compensation benefits if they are sick or should become sick as a result of 9/11 exposure. Less than half the estimated 100,000 volunteers and workers who are eligible to register have done so. Authorities urge workers to register as a precaution. Joel Shufro of the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health says that “”You don’t have to experience symptoms to file for this …You may never use it. We are seeing so many workers now developing symptoms and some are getting worse. So this is a very protective measure, safety net, so people who do get sick in the future will have protection.”
Popcorn Lung – Richard Bales of Workplace Prof Blog posts that an Illinois jury has awarded $30.4 million to a plant worker suffering severe lung disease from diacetyl. See more from on the popcorn lung case from the Joplin Globe.
BP agrees to pay for safety violations at Texas City refinery
Liz Borowski of The Pump Handle reminds us that before BP became synonymous with the Gulf oil disaster, it’s prior “claim to fame” was the 2005 Texas City refinery disaster that killed 15 workers. When OSHA conducted a 2009 follow-up investigation, it issued $50.6 million in failure-to-abate citations, plus $30.7 million for 439 new willful violations it identified. BP had disputed these violations, but last week, agreed to pay the entire $50.6 million.

9-11 Workers Compensation – Report on 45,000 World Trade Center Cases

Friday, September 25th, 2009

In September, the New York State Workers’ Compensation Board released a 59-page report on World Trade Center Cases in the New York Workers’ Compensation System (PDF), along with a reminder that the clock is ticking for rescue and clean-up workers to register service. The registration deadline is September 11, 2010. Registering puts a stake in the ground to preserve the right to benefits should they be needed at a future time.
The data is a significant historical record and analysis of the largest single workers compensation event in insurance history. Report findings are limited to claims covered under the New York State Workers’ Compensation Law so do not include police, fire, or sanitation workers, federal employees, out-of-state employees, and people who were not working.
For a sample of the report, here is an executive summary of the 9-11 Workers Comp report taken from a press release issued with the study:

Among All Cases
The Board has 13,676 workers’ compensation cases resulting from the World Trade Center disaster. This study focuses on the 11,627 cases where there is comprehensive claim data. More than half the cases were for victims of the attacks, and about 40 percent were for rescue, recovery and clean-up workers. In 5,220 cases, the Board received an initial filing but no medical evidence supporting the claim, or the worker did not pursue the claim (by filing information or attending a hearing). The Board is actively contacting those workers, to determine why they did not pursue their claims. Carriers disputed 40 percent of World Trade Center cases, more than twice the rate of other claims. Three-quarters of all cases were filed before 2004. Only 4 percent of cases have open issues.
Death Cases
There are 2,064 death claims; 2,058 were for people killed in the attacks. The Board has just three death cases for rescue, recovery and clean-up workers. There were three other fatalities, as well. Fifty-two domestic partners of victims received a death benefit, under special provisions of a 2002 law.
Rescue, Recovery and Clean-up Cases
In 4,670 claims, rescue, recovery and clean-up workers received benefits. Nearly 90 percent of these cases are for respiratory system diseases. The Board has received 39,151 WTC-12 forms since 2006. On a WTC-12, the filer states he or she performed rescue, recovery and clean-up efforts for the World Trade Center, in an area south of Canal St.; at Fresh Kills Landfill; on the barges, the piers, and at the morgues. While not a claim, it preserves the right to future benefits, should one ever need them. Gov. Paterson signed legislation last year extending the deadline to Sept. 11, 2010, for World Trade Center workers and volunteers to file a WTC-12. Since beginning a national publicity campaign in June 2008, the rate of filings has increased more than tenfold.