Consider this: Cook County has paid more than $7.3 million in worker’s compensation claims this year. Yesterday, commissioners approved nearly $300,000 in claims.
That included:
While some/most/all of these are no doubt hard-working employees who came on some hard luck, Commissioner Bridget Gainer says there’s a flaw in the worker’s comp process, which has little oversight and few opportunities for legislators to investigate workers’ claims.
She told the board’s finance committee that it seemed to be “an excessive amount of dollars for ridiculous claims. How do you pay someone $2,400 for excessive writing?”
Turns out, according to Deputy State’s Attorney Patrick Driscoll petitioners benefit from “a no-fault system, so petitioners don’t have to prove anything.”
Gainer, a Democrat who made a career in the insurance business before becoming a commissioner earlier this year, believes there is a need to reform the way worker’s compensation is dealt with. But it’s a tricky issue, which may not be able to be solved at the local level.
“The people that review worker’s comp at the state, it’s very similar to the arbitration boards we go to in collective bargaining. It’s very pro-worker. That sounds great, except who’s paying for all these payments? It’s the taxpayer,” says Gainer, whose call for reform was backed by Commissioner Timothy Schneider, a Republican.
A better system for measuring claims could result in more money for vital services like health care and safety, says Gainer. And with the partial repeal of the county’s sales tax, commissioners will be looking for ways to plug budget holes in 2011.
“It gave us fair warning,” Gainer says. “Liabilities like worker’s comp, litigation payout, pension – they are huge liabilities for these public entities and because they drip and drip and bleed out slowly, you don’t see them as this crazy thing.
“The world is divided into solvable and unsolvable problems. There have to be portions of this that are on the solvable side of the problem.”