WSIA

Workers' comp can be a staid topic, but not necessarily on Tuesday as several testy exchanges broke out between Senators and participants.

Last Thursday, November 10th, nearly 200 WSIA members, friends, and colleagues from all corners of the workers' compensation world in Washington came together at Safeco Field for a special fundraiser benefiting Kids' Chance of Washington.

Back -- way back -- in the day, in the late 90s and early years of this millennium, Washington used to rank alongside Oregon in the high thirties out of fifty states for highest premiums, prompting the improbable rallying cry at the Department of Labor & Industries of that era, that the secret sauce of Washington's monopoly made us a "high benefits, low cost" state for workers' comp.

In an effort to shed greater light on the workings of the Washington Supreme Court in areas of concern to WSIA, such as cases affecting workplace safety and workers' compensation law, the association has published a brief report recapping the top cases in these areas over the last six years, and showing how the current sitting justices of the court voted in them.

What does it mean in Washington for the testimony of injured workers' attending physicians to be given "special consideration" in appeals, and is that a mandatory rule upon which juries in Superior Court appeals must be instructed?

Spring has sprung, cherry blossoms on the capitol campus have popped, allergies are in the air, and the Washington State Legislature, despite going into an overtime period to complete its work, has finally adjourned for the year this week. Here is our wrap-up of what went down, particularly in the areas of workers' compensation and workplace safety issues.

Recently, the Board of Industrial Insurance Appeals has been rejecting proposed Claim Resolution Structured Settlement Agreements (CRSSA) that include language requiring objective findings of a worsening condition to support re-opening the claim.

On Friday afternoon, the Department of Labor & Industries released the interim report of the Benefit Accuracy Working Group, an employer-labor-department collaborative convened by the Legislature in 2015 to look for improvements in the accuracy, consistency, fairness, and simplicity of calculating time loss benefits in Washington.