Kentucky: Death Following Surgery is Compensable in Spite of Passage of 10 Years

Where an injured worker died from complications following surgery to treat a medical condition that was tied to a work-related injury that had occurred ten years earlier, his widow was entitled to statutory income benefits under Ky. Rev. Stat. § 342.750(1)(a), held the Supreme Court of Kentucky. The Court said the widow could not recover, however, the statutory $50,000 lump-sum death benefit because the worker's death occurred more than four years after the work-related accident. The high court stressed that KRS 342.750(1)(a) contained no temporal limitation and the Court would not construct one. The Court was unconvinced by the widow's argument that the four-year limitation on the lump sum benefit amounted to a violation of her constitutional guarantee of equal protection.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the 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 Calloway Cty. Sheriff's Dep't v. Woodall, 2020 Ky. LEXIS 300 (Sept. 24, 2020)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 10.02.

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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