The corporate juggernaut in Jefferson City has run roughshod over the average Missouri worker, playing a modern version of “lies, lies and statistics.”
Now, every time Missourians go to work, they will risk a medical and financial catastrophe.
During the legislative debate over workers’ compensation, I was bemused, startled and finally outraged at attempts by the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and its business allies to invent a workers’ compensation crisis here.
The facts are plain: Over the past decade or more, Missouri businesses and their workers have been able to use competitive forces and aggressive safety programs to control workers’ compensation costs.
Let’s rely on the official statistics.
The Missouri Department of Insurance shows that from Jan. 1, 1994 – when the state deregulated pricing – until the end of February 2005, average workers’ compensation insurance rates increased by only one-tenth of 1 percent. What other cost of doing business has escaped inflation altogether for more than a decade?
That’s virtually no change in 11 years, despite an upsurge in medical costs and the upheaval that struck all lines of commercial insurance after the stock market collapse of 2001.
State data shows that 248 of 320 workers’ compensation insurers are charging lower rates today than they did in 1994.
Of late, Missouri workers’ compensation rates have stabilized and headed downward again. The Department of Insurance shows that of 134 companies changing rates in January and February, 100 reduced their rates an average of 3.3 percent.
Despite the Chamber’s fixation on isolated cases of fraud – which already is illegal and subject to prosecution – the Missouri Division of Workers’ Compensation reports that workplace injuries reported declined by 28 percent, or more than 55,000 cases a year, since 1995. Missouri’s workers are not abusing this system.
Where is the crisis?
Employers that have failed to invest in workplace safety – or simply faced unfortunate accidents – may have seen their insurance rates increase over the past decade.
But the employers I talk with regularly don’t use the shrill rhetoric that the Missouri Chamber adopted. They don’t need or support the heavy-handed changes in Senate Bill 1 that Gov. Matt Blunt has just signed.
As good employers who value their workers, they understand that the injured employee is vulnerable and is not helped by provisions of SB 1 that:
• overturn 80 years of case law that provided certainty on how workplace injuries are treated in Missouri. SB 1 will force workers to document that the job was the (undefined) “prevailing” factor in their injuries, not simply the substantial contributing factor.
• eliminate coverage of many well-accepted injuries because they can’t be measured by independent tests, including soft-tissue and repetitive-motion injuries, and those that are manifested primarily by pain.
• shift costs for treating workplace injuries to the employee’s own health, auto and even homeowners policies.
• deny, in practice, any assistance for injured workers who have to fight the insurance companies on claims. SB 1 eliminates the state’s legal advisers for claimants but limits legal fees to the extent that attorneys won’t take these cases despite the growing obstacles to claims.
Certainly nothing in Missouri’s workers’ compensation environment justifies the current assault on our state’s workers – blue-, white- and pink-collar – in Jefferson City that leaves them, their families and our communities at financial and medical risk.
Hugh McVey is president of the Missouri AFL-CIO.
