In my post last week related to ProPublica’s Demolition article, I said:
Informed sources indicated that reporters Michael Grabell of ProPublica and NPR’s Howard Berkes failed to contact WCRI before this week; a rather stunning oversight on the part of the reporters.
I was wrong, and I apologize for the error. Turns out at least one of the reporters attended WCRI’s 2014 meeting, and they did email WCRI multiple times requesting various reports and research documents. The error is mine and mine alone and is solely due to my misinterpretation of conversation with sources.
Speaking about ProPublica/NPR’s recent work comp reporting at last week’s WCRI conference, WCRI President and CEO Rick Victor PhD. noted it is very difficult to write a balanced article using anecdotes as the basis.
Dr Victor’s point assumes one is looking to write a balanced article.
While there are numerous examples of what I see as bias in the initial article, here’s one that makes the case. It pertains to choice of physician; the authors infer this is a “limitation of benefits.” I disagree with that inference for multiple reasons, but let’s focus on this statement:
“In 37 states, workers can’t pick their own doctor or are restricted to a list provided by their employers.”
This sentence is factually inaccurate.
There are two reports from WCRI that speak to choice of physician; neither provides support for that statement. It appears the authors added two different and distinct categories – states with employer initial choice, and states restricting employee choice – to arrive at the 37 number.
Considering the first category, states with employer initial choice, many states allow employees to change doctors via various mechanisms and without employer approval. ID, ME, MI, NC, NM, UT, and VT are examples.
Re the second category, restrictions on employee choice are many and varied; certainly they aren’t limited to requiring the worker to pick from a “list provided by their employers.”
Some states allow employees to make one change on their own, others allow a judicial entity to authorize a change, others have different mechanisms. In fact, there are only 15 states that allow the employer to “select [the initial treating] provider without limitation”; several of those allow the employee to change via various mechanisms.
I’d suggest that it would be just as inaccurate to say “35 states allow employees to choose their physician” as it was for the authors to write “In 37 states, workers can’t pick their own doctor or are restricted to a list provided by their employers.”
Put another way, it would be equally “accurate”.
I’m not splitting hairs here – this as an example of what I believe to be a bias that pervades this and other articles published to date. There is much nuance and complexity in workers’ comp regulation, nuance that, if not supportive of the authors’ apparent bias, they apparently chose to ignore or misrepresent.
I don’t make this statement lightly. Grabell and Berkes are highly experienced, well-thought-of professional reporters. I’m just a blogger, albeit one who happens to know a lot about work comp.
There’s an awful lot more to this, but you – and I – have work to do and don’t have time to fact-check every statement.
What does this mean for you?
If you see this differently, if you think I’m being unfair, if, as one subscriber said in an email they inadvertently sent me that I’m a “shill for the insurance industry”, I’d like to hear how and why I’m getting this wrong.
Joe, I don’t think you are being unfair, perhaps a little over-offended. Having been interviewed and quoted a number of times in newspapers or non-industry publications, it is amazing to see your quotes in print and the context surrounding those quotes appear totally different than what you thought the line of questioning to be. In defense of the reporters, consider yourself, as a humble blogger, researching and reporting a long-form article on a subject that you don’t deal with every day. You will never get all the nuances of someone who lives and breathes that topic. Reporters can’t have the depth of knowledge on every subject they report on.
Its complex to get all the nuances of WC, as you have stated before. Then you have the original story pitch, you always have to have an angle, then you have editors who (in this case) bend the article perhaps even more to comport with the social justice angle that Pro-Publica (and maybe NPR) is seeking to communicate. We can nitpick all the things they missed, but as you DePaolo and I think even Bob Wilson have pointed out, you are missing the larger argument, that seems to be increasingly growing louder, there is vast disparity between WC systems and some may not adequately protect or compensate one half of the grand bargain partners – the workers.
If we ignore this, we run the peril of being left behind, and being seen as part of the problem, rather than being asked to participate in creating a more perfect solution as the issue passes us by. Pushes for higher minimum wages, guaranteed paid family leave, affordable housing, even same sex marriage are issues that 6-7 years ago were just not seen on a national level, maybe state to state yes. Now the landscape has shifted and the paradigm of what looks fair has moved as well.
And anecdotally while I enjoy your blog immensely (not pandering) there were multiple times when I worked at another company, when M&A or customer switch mentions in your blog were met with cries of “yeah, but Paduda never gets the story right, he doesn’t have the whole picture.”
mr. paduda i agree…. nothing wrong with focusing on a problem, but you have to give the reader all the facts. cherry picking facts is not good journalism. the job of a reporter is to inform, not persuade. if that is what they want to do, they should have gone into advertising. it would not have hurt their story if they said most injured workers get the treatment they need, but some workers are falling through the cracks and new state reforms may make the problem worse or something to that effect… as you said, comp is complicated. i am glad they covered the issue, but wish they did a better job of laying out all the facts instead of cherry picking what facts they wanted people to take away to support their own assertions…. politicians and people with agendas do that, but respected papers and news services are not supposed to to it because it does everyone a disservice… give us all the facts and let us make our own decisions…
Joe,
If it is any consolation, when I wrote my posts on employee/employer choice, I had to go back and correct myself, and by the time I made my Mexico presentation, had defined that issue more clearly, and with greater complexity, as there are different conditions that apply.
On another note, where is my blog listing?
I was not particularly shocked by this very biased article. Since it is trying to sell a message that compensation rates are insufficient for insured workers to live, I understand the hyperbole. The article is correct. However, as you stated Joe, the issues are much more complex. We must look at benefits and workers compensation in the context of the whole of our entitlement programs. We are leaving a lot of constituencies behind e.g. the more than five million children in poverty, the millions without health care. Does workers compensation, whatever the rates, effectively distribute the cost and benefit of a subset of people who are disabled from work? Does social security effectively deliver the cost and benefit to people disabled from work? Just to what degree and how often do work related events significantly contribute to the disability for which benefits are being paid? What is the value today of the grand bargain to employers? We do need to provide adequate benefits for the disabled, no question. And no question rates are to low for many to adequately take care of that. But before we just raise them, lets seriously study the whole issue and not just within the silo of workers compensation.