A top-notch new book has been published by the Upjohn Institute in which a veteran economist and his younger colleague undertake an analysis of U.S. workers’ compensation programs. The focus of the authors, H. Allan Hunt and Marcus Dillender, is on how workers’ compensation is, in the present day, performing in what they view as its three critical areas: providing adequate benefits to support beneficiaries in the wake of work injuries; facilitating workers’ return to work at time-of-injury employers; and promoting workplace safety through the financial incentive of mandatory insurance and experience rating. See H. Allan Hunt & Marcus Dillender, Workers’ Compensation: Analysis for Its Second Century (2017).
To a great extent this short book is an updated overview of the literature in these three areas. A frequent theme, meanwhile, is the familiar complaint that, as workers’ compensation is a state-based program, study of overall performance is difficult in the extreme. This is particularly so in the area of benefit adequacy, where analysts must compare wage-loss jurisdictions (like their home state of Michigan), with permanent impairment states – while at the same time trying to make some stab at judging the adequacy of the lump sum compromise settlements that so predominate in the present day. The authors ultimately render no broad conclusion on whether U.S. programs are providing adequate and equitable wage replacement. And, on a depressing note, they posit that policymakers have “insufficient interest” in the question.
To this writer, the most interesting discussion centers on returns to work by employees to their time-of-injury employers. While hardly a new concept, the authors portray early and aggressive attempts to return employees to work as part of the broader disability management movement that has evolved in the last few decades as a cost control strategy. An observation that rings particularly true is that return to work has to a great extent displaced ambitious (and often expensive) vocational rehabilitation programs run by state agencies. Of course, on the ground, we perhaps see the process most dramatically in the tension between injured workers’ lawyers and employers, as the latter utilize nurse case managers (who often can be aggressive) to facilitate prompt return to work. Claimants’ counsel on occasion view such nurses as partisans – mere extensions of the adjuster – while the employer and carrier view such interventions as in good faith and critical, in many cases, to get the claimant the best care and ease the worker’s return to his or her job.
The Hunt & Dillender book is an excellent overview of the system. The book would be especially valuable for the law student who desires to go beyond the legal principles and rules which dominate claims adjustment and litigation and craves exposure to, and sophistication surrounding, all aspects of the program. At 129 pages the book is highly digestible. It’s also flawlessly edited and produced and features an excellent bibliography.
Workers’ Compensation: Analysis for Its Second Century can be read online for free. See http://research.upjohn.org/up_press/244/. Hardcopies can be purchased for $14.99. See https://www.upjohn.org/sites/default/files/pdf/17-18-Upjohn-Pubs-Catalog.pdf.
> Thanks to my colleague Tim Schmidle, Ithaca, NY, for connecting me with this important new work!