Price increases, cumulative trauma, and air ambulances...
Gotta love the bizarre world of workers' comp
For our workers’ comp readers there’s a few items worthy of your attention.
In the “how in the world can they charge that much?” category we bring you air ambulances…fortunately the brainiacs at WCRI have a quick 8 minute explainer here….thanks to WorkCompWire for the heads up.
Then there’s medical inflation - one component of the inflation formula is price (the others are volume and intensity (and claim counts, but that depends on how you measure inflation which we’ll discuss later). WCRI released its annual - and free to all - report on non-facility medical prices.
Couple “highlights”…
Wisconsin is the costliest with prices waaaay higher than the median of the 36 states studied,
States with fee schedules had noticeably lower price increases than those without…with some major exceptions.
And in what will be not a shock to anyone who’s been following California’s work comp system, cumulative trauma claims are exploding.
From Risk & Insurance:
CT claims now represent 26% of indemnity claims in preliminary 2024 data, up from 13% in 2012.
58% of CT claims in accident years 2022–2024 were filed after a worker’s employment ended, up from 44% in accident years 2013–2015.
99% of post-termination CT claims involved litigation, compared with 82% of non-post-termination CT claims.
Medical-legal services accounted for 37% of paid medical costs on CT claims in accident years 2022–2024, up from 24% in 2017–2019.
Interpreter service utilization per CT claim reached more than six times 2014 levels by 2024.
We reported on this some time ago…shockingly California seems to be the only state with a significant problem in CT claims, although this may be creeping across the borders…
What does this mean for you?
Work comp is a very soft target…Watch your data for emerging cost areas.