BY DAVID DE PAOLO –  Health care reform is not if, but when. It has already started and in ways that most people don’t comprehend. Workers’ compensation is a medically driven benefit delivery system generally provided through insurance. Health care is primarily an insurance driven medical delivery system most commonly provided through employers. When guaranteed health care becomes reality the employer community will not put up with the inefficiency of competing health care systems, and workers’ compensation as we know it now will cease to exist – to be replaced with a combination of guaranteed health care and work injury insurance. Work injury insurance will provide incentivized income replacement with employee participation levels designed to encourage saving for potential work injury instances, along with incentives for returning to gainful, productive activity.

Change is going to happen – it is up to those who care enough about the social and economic implications to ensure that positive change occurs so that we evolve from a disability entitlement mentality to an ability-based productive reward system. I have been in the workers’ compensation industry now for 25 years, and I have experienced “reform” in 1987, 1993, 1997 and 2004. My experience says that each reform, built successively on prior reform, only complicates the system, making it more unworkable for the ultimate stakeholders – employers and injured workers. The system is designed to be gamed – by employees, employers, attorneys, doctors, insurance companies, even the government is in on the games.

For some reason, in our workers’ comp system we have an expectation that people will be worse off after treatment than before. Why is this? Why do we buy into the expectation that a person will have any disability? Why don’t we have an expectation that members of society will be productive?

I have been through catastrophic injury and recovered to become the managing partner of a respected law firm, and then founder, president of WorkCompCentral. There are many stories of individuals that have either been rendered severely handicapped by injury or were born with severe functional challenges – yet they are out living incredibly successful lives.

I’m an optimist and I believe that a majority of those concerned will buy into a new system of positive motivations so long as their needs are met. Will it be perfect? No. Can something better be crafted than current systems? Absolutely.

What is apparent now is that what was designed 100 years ago is no longer relevant. It’s time to entertain new thinking, new strategies, new ideas – and the path to a new system is on the coattails of health care reform. Before the conference, consider the following:

-Have you ever had a workers’ compensation claim, even if medical-only?

-Do you know how much paper is actually received by a medical-only work comp claimant?

-Why do people get attorneys in the first place for work comp cases?

Let me know your answers here by writing them in the blog.