What’s the deal with long-term COVID?

Why are facility costs increasing and where?

How will labor market disruptions affect work comp?

These and other questions will be addressed in Boston March 16 and 17 at WCRI’s Issues and Research Conference. I caught up with WCRI CEO John Ruser and Communications Director Andrew Kenneally to get the scoop.

remember these days…?

[Register here…don’t put it off as this often sells out]

COVID

26 months into the COVID era we know a lot more about the short-term health impacts of COVID (and associated medical costs and duration) but we’re only starting to understand how COVID infections affect us – and may impact work comp – over the long term. Dr Ruser noted the:

“majority of COVID claims are short duration and most don’t have medical expense, things that are going to surprise us may well be long covid associated (issues)…(we are) doing studies on covid claims and persistence in terms of services provided that WC payers are covering”

Denise Algire, Dan Allen, and Craig Ross DO are the panelists for a discussion of the workplace “after” COVID; mandates, return to worksites, and medical care are all on the docket. [I’m not sure there will ever be an “after” COVID; more likely we’re entering a “COVID era.”]

Facility costs

WCRI’s members have identified facility costs (inpatient and outpatient hospital and ambulatory surgery facility) as a key concern; one of the biggest drivers is provider consolidation.  Dr Bogdan Savych and Dr Sebastian Negrusa will discuss their research into the effect of provider consolidation on workers’ comp medical payments; Dr Ruser:

“WCRI’s stakeholders raised this as a top issue…there will be some eyebrows raised as there hasn’t been research on the impact of vertical and horizontal integration’s effect on workers comp. We will discuss the implications for costs from both vertical integration and the acquisition of Primary care practices by larger health systems.“

More on this issue here here and here.

Employment

The estimable Dr Bob Hartwig will educate and engage as only he can. Somehow Dr Hartwig manages to make the densest of topics relevant and entertaining. With employment a key driver of all things workers’ comp;

“disruptions in labor markets are going to have lasting impacts on the way we work and on workers’ comp claims. Bob Hartwig is coming to talk about these disruptions and their implications for workers’ comp”

What does this mean for you?
All in all, a festival of facts, a cornucopia of content,  await us in Boston…along with a most-needed opportunity to see old friends and, dare I say…shake hands?

In my ongoing effort to help you, dear reader, stay informed and on top of important stuff, I have this email folder titled “Blog Fodder” wherein I park news items worthy of your attention.

Here’s the fodder filling the folder these days…

Cash assistance = potentially smarter kids

A really interesting – and important – study found that babies of mothers that had received cash assistance had increased brain activity when compared to mom’s without cash assistance. From the study…

The resultant brain activity patterns have been shown to be associated with the development of subsequent cognitive skills.

WCRI’s Annual confab will include a session on Drug Formularies and the impact thereof. Register for the meeting here.

The good folks at Ametros collaborated on a study assessing CMS’ denial of payments for work comp-related claims. Evidently some folks thought this didn’t happen…turns out it does. Extrapolating from a random sample, researchers estimate CMS denied 36 thousand claims annually from 2018 to 2020.

Hear all about it in their February 15 webinar; register here.  And download the report here.

COVID good news.

From the NYT, the CDC released a study showing:

[boosters] are 90 percent effective against hospitalization with the [Omicron] variant, the agency reported. Booster shots also reduced the likelihood of a visit to an emergency department or urgent care clinic. The extra doses were most effective against infection and death among Americans aged 50 and older…

How effective for us oldsters?

VERY..unvaccinated Americans between 50 and 64 were 44 times more likely to end up in the hospital with Covid than those in the age group who were vaccinated and received a booster shot.

And really good news; from Charles Gaba, the uninsured rate for U.S. population was 8.9% for the third quarter of 2021 (July – September 2021), down from 10.3% for the last quarter of 2020 – corresponding to roughly 4.6 million more people with coverage over that time period.

Yesterday NCCI and several state bureaus and research organizations put on an excellent webinar on COVID’s’ impact on Workers’Compensation. The analysis covered 2020 data from 45 states. The full report is available here.

Quick takes

In 2020 about 80,000 COVID claims were accepted in the 45 states at an average cost of $7,800 per claim.

There’s a LOT of interstate variation, with COVID accounting for 1% of claims in Montana and 29% in Kentucky.  The high rate in KY was somewhat higher than rates in MN; in all other states except NJ COVID claims accounted around 15% or less of total claims. The high percentages appear to be due to presumption laws which were quite broad in Kentucky and Minnesota.

Median was 7.2%…

Aa a percentage of incurred loss, COVID accounted for about 1.7% of incurred losses in the median state. Again there was a wide range, from 0.2% (Alabama) to 12% (D.C.)

COVID claims are diabolically opposite from “regular” work comp claims in that 88% of COVID claims are lost time claims compared to about 2% for “regular” claims. COVID claims are also closing earlier than “regular” claims.

There were 13% fewer Non-COVID claims in 2020 than in 2019; recall there’s been a long-standing annual structural decline in claims of about 3.8%.

The net is non-COVID claims dropped three times more than expected…correlation is not causation, but in this case it’s darn close.

NCCI used polls for audience reaction; the first questions was how impactful COVID direct losses will be on the WC system moving forward.

The responses were puzzling at best.  Clearly COVID claims have NOT been costly – far from it. In 2020 COVID claims accounted for $630 million in incurred losses – just 1/50th of total incurred losses.

Yet almost half (!!!) of respondents said COVID direct losses would be at least moderately impactful.

That, dear reader, makes zero sense.

• The math alone doesn’t support that belief, and workers’ comp folks are supposed to get math.
• There hasn’t been any material change in presumption laws, so that can’t be it.
• But there’s been far too much Chicken Little-ing about COVID.

My guess is that Chicken Little-ing has somehow convinced many that something that a) will be transitory and b) hasn’t been costly and c) is getting ever loss costly to treat will somehow become a far bigger problem than it is.

What does this mean for you?

C’mon people. Stop with the catastrophizing.

So, one really cool thing about the webinar – almost all of the presenters were women. Gotta love that.