New York Workers' Compensation Board in bad shape, says Times

A tremendous, front-page story in The New York Times today is of great interest to every New York workers' compensation attorney, insurance carrier attorney and workers' compensation claimant. In essence, the Times's article lays bare most of the deep faults and deficiencies of New York State's workers' compensation system that stop claimants from getting the prompt and fair compensation they are entitled to.

The product of an 18-month investigation by the Times, the article reveals a system overrun with ambiguities and inefficiencies - a sprawling $5.5 billion-a-year bureaucracy that is the most expensive in the nation yet pays injured workers the least. It is a system based on outdated, 90-year-old laws and managed by a handful of political appointees, many of whom are not even lawyers.

It is a broken system that can make claimants wait years for payments while they accumulate debt, lose their houses and sink into depression.

The Times reporters clearly went to great lengths to give employers' side of the story, with more than enough space spent on detailing some specious claims from a handful of workers. Even so, the article provides a sobering look at the human suffering caused by New York's Byzantine system - a system, the Times not-so-subtly suggests, that is in dire need of major reform.

Working closely with workers' compensation lawyers, I have seen firsthand many of the things the article describes: the baffling results of "independent" medical examinations, conducted by doctors paid by the insurance carriers; the "meat chart" which indicates how much compensation different injuries to various limbs are worth, regardless of that limb's importance to a workers' profession; and the longstanding $400 cap on weekly compensation payments, a small fraction of what many totally-disabled workers' compensation claimants earned on the job.

It is rare for any issue to receive this much attention from a major outlet like the Times. The purpose of a story like this is to inform a wide swath of readers of a little-known problem and, hopefully, shake things up. The Workers' Compensation Board and the state are now under great pressure to respond to this article in some way. With a little bit of luck, this response will come in the form of changes to make the Workers' Compensation Board the bulwark of workers' rights its founders intended.