Well, when you falsely accuse a (very) competent public servant of malfeasance and get rid of him, you get what you deserve.
That’s exactly what’s happening in North Dakota. The state workers comp fund (WSI) is dealing with two separate scandals, one involving alleged illegal removal of a nurse’s entry from a claim file, and the other alleged efforts by management to manipulate WSI’s Medical Director to change his medical opinions.
You would think that the current CEO, Bryan Klipfel, would be on this like white on rice. Alas, Klipfel stumbled into this job, with a grand total of zero prior experience in workers comp, insurance, medical care, rehab, finance, or customer service. But he was a “good listener…”
According to press reports, WSI’s “chief doctor who reviews injured North Dakota workers’ compensation claims said he twice resisted efforts by agency managers to alter his medical opinion.
Dr. Luis Vilella, the medical director for Workforce Safety and Insurance, said he refused to change his medical opinions when asked to do so on two occasions in February or March of 2010.”
I don’t know if the recent effort by WSI management to establish more control over their medical directors is related to those two earlier attempts to get Viella to alter his opinion, but the coincidence is certainly worthy of investigation.
Reading Klipfel’s comments on these issues, it is easy to see just how big a screw up the powers that be made in ousting Sandy Blunt and putting Klipfel, a complete newcomer to business, let alone insurance, never mind workers comp, in charge. Evidently WSI was working on this “policy”, but only submitted it to the state board of medical examiners after Viella asked for the Board’s help. According to press reports, Kilpfel said: “This is a draft policy…We were going to have some work done on it. We want to make sure the policy we have reflects the longstanding policy that legal never drives medical in handling our claims.”
As anyone who knows anything about comp learns on day one, you do NOT mess with medical opinions, and you most certainly do NOT try to get your medical director to alter his or hers’. Yet WSI was in the process of reviewing a policy that would “dictate how medical opinions are to be transcribed, documented, or recorded.”
That’s not all. A WSI nurse case manager found that her entry in a claim file was deleted by a claims manager who didn’t like that the case manager’s statement strengthened the claimant’s case.
Well, folks, you get what you deserve. The real reason Sandy Blunt was prosecuted was because he was working his butt off to reform a dysfunctional state agency that had long been subject to political manipulation; Blunt didn’t stand for that. Now he’s out, a complete incompetent is running the place, and the citizens of North Dakota are paying the price.
The chickens are coming home to roost. Someone is going to have a big job shoveling out the coop after Klipfel et al move out.
Or, as Bob Wilson notes, the dodos are the ones doing the roosting..
Feb
28
