A question many of you face when an employee reports a seemingly minor injury is – Do I report this to protect my back pocket down the road or do I choose to directly pay the provider bill trying to protect my back pocket from the sure to arrive per claim deductible cost?
HERE IS HOW IT BREAKS DOWN IN REALITY
Work Comp is cleverly designed to “get you now or get you later”, but make no mistake about it…it will get you in the end. So the question is not if it will get you, but by how many hard earned dollars it will get you.
The rule is a non-reported Work Comp injury requires a band aid and back to work keeping only a first aid log. This is not the same as an OSHA log, which is another subject for another time.
A Work Comp reportable injury is every claim requiring a doctors’ visit and every single claim where NO BLOOD occurs since the NO BLOOD claims are always the most costly.
Your decision of what to do is a gamble, a gamble the Work Comp system decades ago pre-calculated because the state legislative bodies creating these rules know exactly what you are thinking and how most of you will decide. The cards are stacked against you meaning you cannot win by making the obvious “looking out for this month – do not report the injury” choice. The tease is allowing you to succeed superficially just like playing the gambling tables in Vegas where the house has set things up so you can become confident with a few wins encouraging you to keep going keep going…only to lose out big time in the end. The Work Comp system has equally calculated all of their factors and knows exactly how to beat you at the gambling table when it comes to injuries.
We at Insured Solutions have played this game long enough to realize that any business planning on being around over time cannot and should not fall for the shortsighted approach to managing their Work Comp, because failing to “report every claim” to get that monthly or quarterly cashing savings high…will take a lot more from you than you can ever receive or win in return.
The system has a weighting formula that is calculated to include these very Vegas odds, and beginning in 2013 through 2015 the system is ratcheting up their formula to punish you even more until in 2015 your pay back to them will actually double from where it is during 2012.
This same weighting formula also takes into account your claim “frequency” where the exaggerated myth of your MOD going up for every reported claim continues to have life. This was the case a decade ago but the system has shifted its formula focus from claim frequency (low dollars) to lost time or high dollar claims where the total dollars mount up quickly having a huge cost impact on your MOD almost overnight. This change of focus is not an accident but a chosen path to increase system revenues at your expense. With larger claims this change is perniciously effective because they typically remain OPEN for years (also by design much of the time) meaning they continue to dodge the “one-year last treatment date statute of limitations”. All of this means high-dollar-long-tail claims can drag on for a decade or more, and every year these ever escalating costs are further hammering your back pocket.