The U.S. Department of Labor has issued new data showing California's State Average Weekly Wage (SAWW) edged down 0.48 percent from $1,650 to $1,642 in the 12 months ending March 31, 2023. As a result...
CALIFORNIA COMPENSATION CASES Vol. 88, No. 11 November 2023 A Report of En Banc and Significant Panel Decisions of the WCAB and Selected Court Opinions of Related Interest, With a Digest of WCAB Decisions...
By Hon. Susan V. Hamilton, Former Assistant Secretary and Deputy Commissioner, California Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board Nearly two decades ago Senate Bill 899 was enacted and ushered in a...
LexisNexis has selected some recently issued noteworthy IMR decisions that illustrate the criteria that must be met to obtain authorization for a variety of different medical treatment modalities. LexisNexis...
By Hon. Susan V. Hamilton, Former Assistant Secretary and Deputy Commissioner, California Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board Early in the COVID-19 pandemic we learned that nursing care facilities...
A Pennsylvania appellate court held that a compromise and release (C&R) agreement may not be employed to avoid the procedures in the state’s Workers’ Compensation Act for challenging a provider's invoice or a fee review determination that the invoice must be paid. That is because the parties to a C&R agreement can bind each other; they cannot release themselves from liability to a person or entity who is not a party. Thus, where claimant and the insurer entered into a C&R agreement that provided for payment of all “reasonable, necessary and related medical expenses incurred before the hearing date,” and further provided that no benefits would be paid for any compounded prescription cream, the insurer could not refuse to pay a pharmacy $6,644.30, plus interest, for a compound prescription cream that was prescribed prior to the hearing date on the C&R agreement. The court noted that one year earlier, the insurer had sought utilization review regarding the identical compound cream and the utilization review organization determined that the cream prescribed to Claimant was reasonable and necessary to treat Claimant's accepted work injury. To the extent the insurer desired to challenge the treatment as neither reasonable nor necessary, it had to see UR under the Act.
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 Advance.
See Armour Pharmacy v. Bureau of Workers' Comp. Fee Review Hearing Office (National Fire Insurance Company of Hartford), 2018 Pa. Commw. LEXIS 368 (Aug. 7, 2018)
See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 94.02.
Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law