Jan
23

War and Workers’ Comp

13,000 American civilians have suffered compensable injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are handled through the Federal system, with the Department of Labor having jurisdiction. The volume of cases has grown steadily since 2002, with the DoL now seeing about a thousand cases a month from employers such as Halliburton, Dyncorp, Bechtel and others.
And many of these are not your typical lower back strains. Post-traumatic stress disorder, closed head injuries from IEDs, and shrapnel and concussion injuries, all injuries once limited to soldiers are now suffered by civilians. These injuries are not commonly handled by civilian providers or hospitals, and many claimants are finding it difficult to obtain adequate care for their condition.
Outside of the human cost, the financial implications are staggering. Truck drivers are making upwards of $100k a year, and their workers comp premiums can be as high as $25 – $40 per $100 of payroll. While there is no accurate count of the total number of contractors, at the low end it is 50,000.
Workers comp costs for contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan are over a billion dollars.
Way over.

thanks to the Workers Comp Executive News Digest for the original idea.


Jan
5

Directing care

This is a pretty esoteric workers comp post, so if you aren’t so inclined, click on something else now before your eyes glaze over and it’s too late.
In workers comp, employers have the ability to make claimants go to specific physicians or lists of physicians in some states and don’t in other states. The former are “employer direction” states, the latter are “employee choice” states.
Except that’s not really true.

Continue reading Directing care


Dec
22

Even more Mystified

A couple of sources informed me that the company CorVel bought in California is actually a Work Comp claims company – a third party administrator or TPA.
This is really confusing. Not only does CorVel sell their services to TPAs, but the TPA business in California is in the tank these days. While this may have helped CorVel get a good price, it also means opportunities are limited.
Not only does the stock price bewilder me, so does the strategy.


Dec
12

Third party billers on the block

Third party billers WorkingRx and Third Party Solutions may be for sale. The two pharmacy factoring companies together own the work comp script factoring business, a sector that has been under some pressure lately. According to several industry sources, the owners of both entities (Fiserv for TPS and investment firm Arcapita for WorkingRx) have engaged investment bankers to shop their respective companies.

Continue reading Third party billers on the block


Dec
11

Medicare reimbursement’s downstream impact

In what will come as no surprise to anyone, Congress will eliminate the pending cut in Medicare physician reimbursement. Not only that, but docs who agree to report certain data to CMS will actually get a 1.5% increase in reimbursement from the Feds.
If you listen very closely, you can almost hear the medical community’s resounding “yippee”.
The reasons docs are not exactly ecstatic about the news are two-fold.

Continue reading Medicare reimbursement’s downstream impact


Dec
4

Who’s buying CorVel?

CorVel continues to intrigue. After my last post/prognostication about the potential for CorVel to be on Coventry’s acquisitions-we’re-thinking-about list, trading volume jumped by 40%. I’m not claiming a causal relationship, just a statistical one.
Since then, the average volume has been six times what it was earlier in the year. The stock price itself has seen a similar trajectory, with CorVel now trading close to $60 a share, almost four times its 52 week low.

Continue reading Who’s buying CorVel?


Nov
30

The work comp rumor mill

There’s been a lot of news, non-news, and rumor about deals and transactions and changes in the work comp managed care industry floating around out there. As usual, for some of the rumors there’s a little basis in fact and none at all for others. Here’s a compendium of the more solid stuff.

Continue reading The work comp rumor mill