NY Workers Comp: Good For Everyone Except Injured Workers

The idea behind workers compensation is to provide medical and financial support for workers hurt on the job. "Support" usually means enough money to live on -- rent, food, maybe even som clothes -- if you can't work anymore, or can't work as well due to on-the-job injuries and illnesses.

New York workers compensation attorney Robert Grey thinks there's something seriously wrong with the workers comp system in the state. Writing in the New York Times today, Grey summarizes:

The problem with the workers’ compensation system is that too few of the premium dollars paid by employers reach disabled workers and their families. Too much is kept by insurers, which reap huge profits by pocketing the savings on declining claims instead of reducing charges to employers. Perhaps it should be the other way around.

Why doesn't it work? Let us count the ways. First, the maximum benefit in New York has been $400 per week, no matter what you were making before you were injured. Try living off of that.

According to the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, a nonprofit coalition of unions and individual workers, this is the lowest benefit rate in the country as a percentage of the state’s average weekly wage. By contrast, New Jersey’s maximum weekly benefit is $691 and Connecticut’s is $1,005.

What happens if they can't make it on $500 a week?

According to the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, a nonprofit coalition of unions and individual workers, this is the lowest benefit rate in the country as a percentage of the state’s average weekly wage. By contrast, New Jersey’s maximum weekly benefit is $691 and Connecticut’s is $1,005.

What we're dealing with, as Grey explains, is a business war against workers, particularly the least powerful workers -- those who are injured on the job. A decades long campaign to lower workers benefits, lower premiums that employers have to pay have saved money for companies and insurers, but workers have seen no benefit. And in New York, it's all hidden in a fog of secrecy:

Have insurers passed on their savings from the decline in workers’ compensation claims? It doesn’t look like it, but it’s impossible to know if they’re overcharging employers. Why? Because in New York, these insurers are required to report their data to the Compensation Insurance Rating Board and this board is governed by the insurers. With no independent verification of the insurers’ claims about their charges to employers, their payments to workers or their profits, much of their data remains suspect.

Grey is calling for the New York State Legislature to

empower the state Insurance Department to audit these insurers and publish the results, bringing a measure of truth to the question of how much premium is collected and what portion actually reaches injured workers and their families.

Only then can we start making sure that workers start seeing the benefits of the declining claims and increased profits.