Kentucky: Amended Statute Terminating Benefits at Age 70 Passes Constitutional Muster

A 2018 amendment to Kentucky’s Workers’ Compensation Act that terminates an injured worker’s right to indemnity compensation when the worker reaches the age of 70, or four years from the date of injury or last injurious exposure, whichever event occurs last [see Ky. Rev. Stat. § 342.740(4)] is constitutional, held the state’s Supreme Court. The amendment had been in reaction to the Court’s earlier decision in Parker v. Webster County Coal, LLC, 529 S.W.3d 759 (Ky. 2017), in which a divided Supreme Court had invalidated the 1996 version of the statute. The Court stressed that the 2018 amendment did not suffer from the problems associated with the earlier version. Moreover, the state had a legitimate interest in preventing a duplication of wage-loss programs and in promoting the solvency of the state’s workers’ compensation system.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the co-Editor-in-Chief and Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis 

See Cates v. Kroger, 2021 Ky. LEXIS 311 (Aug. 26, 2021)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 157.03.

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see

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