New Report Exposes Failure of Workers' Compensation Systems

ATLANTA - A new report released today by Georgia Watch and national consumer rights group, Center for Justice & Democracy, finds that workers’ compensation programs nationwide and in Georgia have devastated injured workers, leaving them to contend with an adversarial bureaucracy and inadequate benefits that render many destitute.

The CJ&D report, “Workers’ Compensation – A Cautionary Tale,” calls the workers’ compensation program a “colossal failure” and notes, “[t]he real winners are insurance companies, which continue to boast record profits as workers’ benefits are declining.”
“Workers’ compensation is an unfortunate example of how a seemingly fair program can be manipulated by political forces into a nightmare for those it was originally meant to help,” said attorney and policy analyst Amy Widman, the report’s author.

The report closely analyzes the progressive deterioration of the workers’ compensation system since its inception in the early part of the last century, highlighting disturbing trends in several states. In Georgia, those trends include the insurance industry’s attempt to strip benefits from workers who have suffered catastrophic injuries, and the legislature’s use of the annual maximum compensation rate as a political football.

“Georgia’s maximum weekly compensation is the lowest in the country,” said Georgia Watch Executive Director Allison Wall. “We need to do more for workers who are injured on the job.”
Other deficiencies inherent in Georgia’s workers’ compensation system include:
While most states determine compensation rates based on indexing, or by a percentage (75-100 percent) of the state’s average weekly wage, the state legislature arbitrarily chooses Georgia’s maximum weekly compensation rate, politicizing the decision.
In Georgia, where the state average weekly wage is $680-$700, the weekly maximum compensation rate is $450, the lowest in the country.
Georgia’s statute of limitations is one year from the date of an injury, whereas the statute of limitations in most other states is 2-3 years from the date of the injury.
Weekly indemnity benefits for Georgia workers are cut off after a maximum of 400 weeks, or less than eight years, with few exceptions. While the worker receives lifetime medical benefits, after a maximum of 400 weeks, most workers receive no compensation for lost wage, lost physical ability or lost mental ability.

According to “Workers’ Compensation – A Cautionary Tale”, through a combination of factors like the slashing of benefits, unprecedented and insurmountable eligibility requirements, and continuous industry lobbying of politicians and agency administrators, workers’ compensation programs in many states have been essentially gutted, leaving injured workers without adequate help to care for their families.

The CJ&D Report also brands workers’ compensation a “cautionary tale” about the pitfalls of administrative compensation programs that take away someone’s right to trial by jury, such as proposed “health courts” for medical malpractice victims. Citing problems with workers compensation, the CJ&D Report warns against this idea, stating, “Once political forces take over a statutory system, and they always do, it is merely a matter of time before a pro-victim proposal for no-fault compensation is turned into a fault-based, bureaucratic nightmare for the injured person.”