Is set for release at a public meeting in Washington this Wednesday, October 5, at 10 AM. While the content has been closely held, sources indicate topics  include:

• increasing inadequacy of benefits,
• restrictions on medical care for injured workers,
• new procedural processes and hurdles for claimants, and
• the effect these trends have had on Social Security Disability Insurance.

There will also be a discussion of Opt-Out; DoL’s Employee Benefit Security Administration has been looking into opt-out alternative plans and their compliance with ERISA.

We do not yet know what the report will say about these topics, however a close reading of OSHA’s March 2015 report provides some clues.  Actually, the title alone may be predictive:

ADDING INEQUALITY TO INJURY: THE COSTS OF FAILING TO PROTECT WORKERS ON THE JOB

A paragraph from the report’s Executive Summary follows:

The costs of workplace injuries are borne primarily by injured workers, their families, and taxpayer-supported components of the social safety net. Changes in state-based workers’ compensation insurance programs have made it increasingly difficult for injured workers to receive the full benefits (including adequate wage replacement payments and coverage for medical expenses) to which they are entitled. Employers now provide only a small percentage (about 20%) of the overall financial cost of workplace injuries and illnesses through workers’ compensation. This cost-shift has forced injured workers, their families and taxpayers to subsidize the vast majority of the lost income and medical care costs generated by these conditions. [emphasis added]

Another paragraph speaks to under-reporting of workplace injuries and illnesses:

While the estimate of three million serious work-related injuries each year may seem extremely high, it is undoubtedly only a fraction of the true number. Numerous studies provide documentation that many, and perhaps the majority, of work-related injuries are not recorded by employers, and that the actual number of workers injured each year is likely to be far higher than the BLS estimate

The meeting, entitled the State Workers’ Compensation Forum (you can attend or sign up for the video feed by registering here) will include representatives from the National Academy of Social Insurance and the Social Security Administration (I am a member of NASI but have had no involvement with this initiative).

Suggestions and observations. 

1. Remain calm.
2. It’s important to read the entire report.
3. Have an open mind.
4. Under-reporting of claims is good news for the workers’ comp “industry” as it creates:
   1. more incentive for safety and loss prevention,
   2. more opportunities for vendors,
   3. more premium for workers’ comp insurers, and
   4. likely better outcomes due to professional management of injuries and illnesses by work comp payers.

 

 

ProPublica’s unethical “reporting” is being used in a PR effort to distort and demonize the workers’ comp industry.

An ethical journalistic organization would have sent a reporter to this week’s IAIABC conference, where they would have found 300 people all focused on improving a system that works quite well for the vast majority of patients and employers.

Instead PP’s “research” has been put into an “infographic“‘ that, by some unfathomable logic, attempts to link states’ occupational fatalities to a contrived, wholly inaccurate, and totally misleading “cut in benefits.”  (more on that here) What one has to do with the other escapes me.

PP defines “cut in benefits” as including, among other things:

• adoption of utilization review and/or evidence-based clinical guidelines (can you IMAGINE!)
• employer direction of care (to avoid patients going to pill mills and purveyors of fake surgical implants)
• using outside medical reviewers to assess medical care
• considering a patient’s pre-existing conditions in determining if an injury should be allocated to a specific employer

The mis-infographic is here, hosted on a law firm’s website.

Allow me to describe what a PP reporter would have seen if they’d bothered to attend IAIABC, the conference that, more than any other, digs into the issues PP seems most concerned about – how injured workers are treated by the work comp system.

They would have heard a terrific presentation by three physicians on improving the quality of medical care delivered to workers comp patients, followed by much discussion among regulators on how to increase the quality of care in their states and provinces.

They would have watched over a hundred regulators and other stakeholders work for four hours to develop an agenda for continued improvements in worker outcomes, safety, medical care, and satisfaction.

They would have heard countless hallway conversations about what this state or that state is doing to speed delivery of benefits, facilitate return to work, reduce friction in the system, and what other states might be able to learn from those efforts.

They would have heard a lengthy and detailed discussion about medical treatment guidelines, and a passionate debate about how evidence-based guidelines can improve the medical care delivered to patients.

They would have heard about an industry that is working every day to reduce the volume and potency of opioids prescribed and dispensed to patients – and having a LOT of success. (cue the totally false, dishonest, and self-serving BS from self-described “injured worker advocates” about how this is adding to suffering).

They would have heard a claims exec talking about his company’s policy on paying workers; NOT waiting to make absolutely sure a claim’s been accepted, but cutting checks to pay workers’ lost wages as soon as they think the worker will be out of work for more than a couple of days.

Nope.

Why try to get the facts when it’s easier to gain pageviews by vilifying individuals who are doing their damndest to make things better?

It’s long past time each and every one of us stood up to this BS.  You – yes, YOU – need to promote, emphasize, publicize your successes.

The patient you helped find a new job.

The house you built to accommodate the paraplegic with a family.

The calls you made to that doctor to get them to change the script from Fentanyl to ibuprofen and physical therapy.

The visit to the plant to figure out why there’s been several recent shoulder injuries.

The time spent talking with state legislators about the importance of prescribers checking Prescription Drug Databases.

The multiple calls with the injured worker’s spouse, helping them understand and navigate the work comp system while listening to their fears and assuring them the check’s been cut.

What does this mean for you?

Sure, you can follow the usual insurance company playbook – don’t say ANYTHING because someone could misconstrue it.

THAT’s worked really well, hasn’t it?

 

 

WCRI’s report on variations in hospital outpatient costs is yet more evidence of the wide and seemingly nonsensical variations in work comp regulations, fees, payments, and practices among and between states.

Among the findings:

• an eight-fold variation in costs from the lowest-cost state – NY – to the highest – AL.
• Shockingly, fee schedule states’ costs are a LOT lower than non-fee schedule state costs.
• Costs in percentage-of-charge fee schedule states were much higher than those in states with Medicare-based fee schedules.

There’s a wealth of information in the report; here’s my takeaways.

Captain Obvious Alert.

In many states, workers’ comp is a huge profit generator for hospitals and health care systems.  Anyone following the drama in Florida surrounding “negotiations” around facility reimbursement in past years saw this play out in vivid color.

Hospitals are almost always much more politically influential than workers’ comp stakeholders, giving them a decided advantage in influencing legislation, and sometimes regulation as well.

As Medicaid and Medicare continue to clamp down on costs, hospitals and health care systems will get even better at maximizing revenue from workers’ comp.  Moreover, network discounts provided to workers’ comp payers are fading as payers realize the opportunity inherent in comp, and work comp PPO contractors confront the “yeah but you’re only 1 percent of my revenue” argument.

There is an entire industry devoted to revenue maximization; claims adjusters and bill review folks would be well-served to brush up on the techniques used by these folks. Here’s just a couple examples from quick research…

• Pennsylvania‘s regs and reimbursement are among the most arcane
• A national approach
• Lien expertise
• 86 (!) companies that provide “revenue cycle management” services

Considering the dollars paid to facilities and hospitals account for at least a third of work comp medical spend in most states, this is a big problem.

So, what to do?

1. Analyze your data! Where are you spending your dollars – by state, facility, employer.
2. Compare it to WCRI’s information – not just in this report, but the others these brilliant researchers have produced
3. Direct, channel, refer – even in states where you don’t have an absolute right to “direct”, you CAN influence where your patients go to get care.
4. Find and work with a medical bill review specialist with expertise in the specific states of most concern.
5. Get creative – talk to your adjusters with long and deep experience to find out what works and what doesn’t.

Kudos to WCRI’s Olesya Fomenko and Rui Yang for their work – they’ve taken a shipload of data and turned it into information that’s understandable  – and actionable.

Not to rub it into my friends and colleagues who are “working” in Orlando this week, but here in Montana it is 73, dry, sunny, and the mountain views are spectacular. Of course, flying into Bozeman isn’t nearly as…challenging as the obstacle course of strollers, elderly folks (my mom is 95, so don’t flame me), clueless travelers, little-kids-running-in-circles and mouse-hat-wearing families that is MCO.

While the attendees at the Montana Governor’s Conference on Workers’ Compensation won’t be partying to ThirdEyeBlind, these westerners have just as much fun at their annual confab as anyone.  Some have even more.  Film at 11.

I’m sure Bob Wilson will report back after his keynote talk here tomorrow; in what might well be a preview of the Clinton:Trump debate the esteemed WorkCompKing and I will be on the stage discussing matters of great import.  As we are the last session before the cocktail hour, don’t expect us to run long.

On to more serious matters.  And not much is more serious than the goings-on in California these days.

In California, we’ve learned that a big chunk of the liens filed are the work of individuals convicted or criminally indicted.  A total of $600 million in liens fall into this category, with a total of $2.5 billion – yes, that’s with a “B” – filed by “68 businesses comprising the top one percent of lien filers [who] filed more than 273,000 liens totaling $2.5 billion in accounts receivable on adjudicated cases between 2013 and 2015.” 

The Department of Industrial Relations’ summary goes on to note:

The assignment of liens by service providers to those who file and collect on liens are, in essence, the buying and selling of injured workers’ treatments and fertile ground for presenting fraudulent claims.  DIR’s review of filing dates indicates that lien claimants tend to wait until after the primary case is settled rather than seeking early resolution of medical necessity.

My interpretation – these scam artists are waiting to file until AFTER the claim is settled because they know full well the fiduciary just wants the damn thing to go away, doesn’t have the resources to fight each and every lien, and is better off paying off these crooks than fighting them.

These people add no value, deliver no service, help no one, and want to get paid for it.  

Here’s hoping California’s legislature jumps on this issue, prohibits lien filing by criminals and for denied claims.  Time is short…

Staying west for a minute, the fine folk at CWCI (Stacy Jones in specific) just published their evaluation of medical fees post-reform.  A main takeaway:

The amount of the reductions [below pre-reform utilization levels] varied by the type of care, ranging from 11.4% for radiology services to 49.5% for medicine services (comprised primarily of ancillary services such as cardiovascular, nerve and muscle testing, and psychiatric testing and psychotherapy), with an overall reduction of 17.7% in all medical services. At the same time, changes in total amounts paid under the schedule ranged from a 44.9% reduction in medicine services to a 12.7% increase in physical medicine services, for a net reduction of 14.3% in payments for all services. [emphasis added]

The implication is this – adoption of Medicare’s fee schedule has increased the volume of and reimbursement for cognitive services – talking with patients, rehabbing patients – and a reduction in payments for doing stuff TO patients; MRIs, nerve tests and the like.

This is good.

Thanks to CWCI’s Bob Young for the info and background.

Housekeeping

The systems folks who do all the IT work on ManagedCareMatters updated our WordPress to the latest version last week, which led to a deluge of bounced emails from former subscribers with dead email accounts.  I’ve been ever-so-slowly cleaning up the subscriber list: this is a highly manual process, requires individually deleting a lot of addresses, and I’m absolutely sure I’ve screwed up and deleted addresses I shouldn’t have.

So, sorry about that.

This is going to take a little while, and in the interim I’m not going to be able to post as often as I’d like.  Hope to get this cleared up by the weekend, or I’m stuck sitting in front of a computer while my lovely bride and friends cavort on the lake.

Grrr.

Over the last few years I’ve had quite a few calls and meetings with folks in the investment community  looking to get up to speed on the workers’ comp industry and various aspects thereof.

While the volume of calls ebbs and flows, of late there’s been increasing interest, likely due to the credit market’s interest in OneCall Care Management and other transactions.

So, here are some key datapoints for anyone looking for basic information.

1. Total workers’ comp premium and equivalents is about $85 billion.  That includes insurance premiums from private carriers and state funds, claims, administrative, and excess insurance costs for self-insureds, governmental programs e.g. FECA, and claims costs for minimum-premium or other “deductible” type insurance plans.
2. Workers’ comp medical costs will be about $33 billion this year.
3. That’s about 1.25% of total US medical spend.
4. Medical costs account for about 60% of claims expense, with indemnity expense accounting for the remainder. (adding administrative costs to claim costs gets you close to total WC premium and equivalents)
5. Claim frequency has been dropping by about 2-3% per year for more than two decades.  That will almost certainly continue.
6. Drug costs will account for around 15-17% of that spend, with physical medicine in the same ballpark.
7. Most states have some sort of medical fee schedule (FS) in place, however there’s MUCH variation among and between the states.  Some only have provider FS, others have provider, drug, facility, DME and other services covered by fee schedules.
8. Almost all provider fee schedules are based on Medicare.  However, few states directly link their FS to Medicare, so when Medicare’s FS changes, it may – or more likely may not – change that state’s reimbursement.

There’s a lot more here; if you are looking for more information, try the search box on this page – it’s up there to the right.  With about 3000 posts on MCM, chances are pretty good there’s some discussion of pretty much every comp-related topic.

btw, good sources are:

NASI.org – see the workers compensation tab

WCRInet.org – everything workers’ comp

CWCI.org – California-specific

NCCI.com – their Annual State of the Line is really good.

I think we’ve figured out why, in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary, plaintiff attorneys in California continue to argue the work comp system mis-serves a large number of workers’ comp patients.  

Before we delve into this, allow me to stipulate that many applicant attorneys are likely well-intentioned, seeking to do good, and may well believe that a lot of work comp patients are ill-served by the work comp system.  Since they only talk with work comp patients that have complaints, that would not be surprising.  And, a relatively few work comp patients are, indeed, ill-served by the system for a variety of reasons – a bad employer and/or boss, crappy doctor, under-trained and/or over-worked claims adjuster – even a lousy attorney.

That said, it appears their representative organization, the California Applicant Attorneys’ Association, is not conversant with research methodology, processes, or statistics – and that’s why they don’t understand that the work comp system is working pretty well.

I draw this conclusion after reading an article entitled “Calling all Applicants: The Injured Worker Survey” from a July 2016 CAAA publication. In the piece, author Richard Meechan argues:

“Nothing makes sense – up is down and they (the Committee on Health and Safety and Workers’ Compensation, or CHSWC) have graphs and charts to prove it.”  

The “Injured Worker Survey” Mr Meechan refers to will apparently enable the CAAA to:

“see how the system is working for the most seriously injured workers.  That would be workers that were out of work for more than a year, our clients, to be more exact.”

This is because the CAAA apparently doesn’t (want to) believe the myriad research studies published by research organizations about injured worker outcomes and related matters.

If you, dear reader, are puzzled by this, allow me to explain. Careful and valid data analysis by experts examining credible data sets can be, and often is, translated into “graphs and charts” to help the non-statistically-endowed understand what is really going on.

In the article, Meechan states he is skeptical of research finding “95 percent of medical requests were approved and that injured workers were satisfied with their medical treatment.”  That skepticism resulted in the CAAA’s enlistment of three attorneys to help the CAAA committee on Health and Safety figure out how to “respond” to these “tales” (referring to the research presented at CHSWC meetings).

While I could find no evidence that any of the enlistees have an educational or experiential background in statistics, statistical analysis, business analysis, the physical sciences, or operations management (heavy in analytics), one of the three did study economics back in the nineteen-sixties. This isn’t to denigrate the trio, rather to contrast their relatively modest scientific research and statistical analysis credentials with those of folks who actually do research.  Like CWCI. And WCRI. And RAND.

Using SurveyMonkey, the CAAA is conducting their “survey” and will likely publish “results” in an attempt to show the information presented at CHSWC meetings, based on reams of research published after hundreds of hours invested in very sophisticated analytical processes employing highly-refined datasets and tested methodologies vetted by actual, real, live, statisticians with decades of experience and darned impressive credentials in data analysis and everything that goes into it is, well, wrong.  

And CAAA will do this based on responses from an on-line, open access survey with no data validation or proof that you are actually an “Injured Worker” needed.

Hey, you can try it yourself, here.

So here’s where the problem lies.

In the article, Mr Meechan notes that fewer than one percent (33) of the 3700+ survey responses asserted they had been out of work for a year or more. Apparently that is concerning. Mr Meechan asks others to help get the word out, as “one hundred responses is the gold standard for surveys and we are short.”

That single statement demonstrates a complete lack of of even a basic understanding of statistics.  Mr Meechan is apparently confusing statistical validity with an arbitrary “gold standard”.  Further, there’s an assumption that all that is needed is 100 SurveyMonkey responses from respondents who claim to have been injured and out of work for more than a year, and he and his associates will have what they need to refute all that science stuff CHSWC throws up there on the screen.

As anyone who has one day of stats knows, without valid underlying data to start with, the whole exercise is pointless.

More directly, garbage in, garbage out.

And in this case, the underlying data is, indeed, meaningless. A gazillion monkeys could be typing away and deliver lots of “results”. Some whizkid could figure out how to program a bot to fill them out with no human intervention at all.  More prosaically, a bunch of law clerks could earn some extra hours banging away on laptops or iPads completing SurveyMonkey surveys.

In this instance it is indeed possible that some or most of the respondents at some point had an encounter with the work comp system. Or not.

I belabor this point not to embarrass the attorneys, for that is NOT my intent. Rather it is to point out an obvious conclusion:

As reform opponents think that a SurveyMonkey random survey will be more valid than real research studies conducted by experts, we now know why “nothing makes sense” to them.

They don’t have a clue.

They are totally, fundamentally, and blindingly ignorant of even the most rudimentary statistical terms and concepts.

 

Note – I don’t have a link to the original article.  sorry – ask CAAA for your copy.