Unjust Compensation
Workers’ compensation started in the early 1900s to provide medical care and disability payments for injured workers. Workers liked the idea of medical treatment and cash benefits while off of work, and employers embraced a system that focused on treating injuries, getting employees back on their feet and eliminating potentially costly lawsuits.
Today, California’s workers’ compensation system serves neither employees nor employers. Benefits for seriously injured workers don’t come close to meeting the demands of California’s increasingly high cost of living, and yet businesses pay more for workers’ compensation here than in any other state.
In 1999 and again in 2000, legislature sent bills to the governor that would have raised benefits but left untouched a system rife with waste and abuse. The cost of the 2000 benefit increase alone was estimated at $2.7 billion.
Gov. Gray Davis vetoed those bills because they did nothing to improve the system and offset some of the burden that the cost of benefit increases would impose on employers.
This year, Senate Bill 71 passed the Senate despite the lack of specificity concerning benefit increases. What we do know is that legislation will do nothing to fix the system and help it run more efficiently.
The Assembly Insurance Committee is scheduled to consider the bill later this month. Employer groups will ask lawmakers to consider amendments that will help pay for the benefit increases through systemic improvements.
Many are concerned the governor will sign a benefits increase bill this year, with or without cost-saving measures. It is critical to the health of California’s economy that legislation balances the cost of benefit increases with needed system reforms.
SB 71 should be amended to include a variety of reforms that will reduce costs and simplify the system. Business organizations are calling for a series of reforms including improved review of medical treatment and preventing unnecessary procedures that prevent a worker’s timely return to work.
Workers’ comp judges should be accountable for prescribed timelines, procedures and professional conduct. Removing the treating physicians’ legal presumption of correctness would mean that doctors would be held accountable for their treatment decisions.
Business leaders also want to ensure that the millions of dollars spent annually to fight workers’ comp fraud are accounted for and the money is being put to the best use.
Finally, penalties for those who entice people to file fraudulent claims must be increased.
While businesses in California are struggling to pay soaring energy bills, higher health care costs and rising unemployment insurance expenses, the last thing our economy needs is higher workers’ compensation rates.
It is imperative that businesses tell their elected representatives how increased workers’ comp costs will impact them and why it’s crucial that SB 71 be amended to reform the system as well as give workers a needed benefit increase. Many remember how out of control workers’ comp costs drove thousands of jobs from California in the 1990s. We can’t let that happen again.
Allan Zaremberg
President
California Chamber of Commerce
Nuclear Science
As Congress ponders how to avoid an energy crisis like the one that has affected California, many people believe that only science fiction can offer a long-term solution: one where discoveries in theoretical physics would lead to a new energy-producing technology. The fuel for this technology, as they imagine it, would be abundantly available, safe, inexpensive and clean.
It may surprise some to learn that the only fiction here is the belief that this is some future fantasy. Actually, the relevant discoveries in physics happened nearly a century ago, and the resulting technology,nuclear power,is now almost 50 years old. But the fact that this valuable technology is playing a diminishing role in our economy reveals something important,not about nuclear power itself, but about the motives of its opponents.
Nuclear power provides a cheap alternative to fossil fuel-based sources of electricity. With comparable capital and operating costs,and a mere fraction of the cost of fuel,it can provide electricity at 50% to 80% the price of traditional sources. It is extremely reliable, and is by far the cleanest of any viable energy source currently known.
Its safety record is also exemplary. The nuclear industry ranks among the safest places to work. It experiences only 0.34 accidents resulting in lost work time per 200,000 worker-hours, compared with a 3.1 average throughout private industry.
Why then is opposition to nuclear power so strong?
The loudest objection raised by anti-nuclear groups is that there is “no safe level of radiation.” It is also the phoniest. Major sources of radiation are natural and ubiquitous: we are continuously bombarded with radiation from cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere and from naturally occurring radioactive elements in the earth.
The average annual radiation dose received by Americans is 360 millirems, or mrems, about 300 of which come from naturally occurring sources like radon. By contrast, you would get only 0.01 mrems per year as a result of living 50 feet from a nuclear power plant. Even a single annual cross-country airplane flight exposes you to 3 mrems, while a medical X-ray gives you a dose of 20 mrems.
The opposition to nuclear power represents a political, not a scientific, viewpoint. Anti-nuclear groups don’t seek a better means of generating energy,they want us to “conserve” and to do with less. Their goal is to turn out the lights on our industrial society. What the defenders of nuclear energy need, therefore, is to defend industrial society,by upholding man’s moral right to produce the wealth on which his values and life depend.
Travis Norsen
Senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute Marina del Rey
