Speaker Pushes Bill to Reform Workers’ Comp

Assembly Speaker Willie Brown on Wednesday launched a personal legislative attack on fraud in the beleaguered workers’ compensation insurance program, including a proposal for drug-war-style seizure of the assets of crooked physicians and others.

The legislation would encourage individual “bounty hunter” citizens to pursue suspected defrauders through the courts, require doctors to make their workers’ compensation evaluations under penalty of perjury and restrict the number of costly medical-legal examinations that an employee can receive at the employer’s expense.

Brown said he believes that new evidence of a dramatic decline in the volume of workers’ compensation claims in California reflects, in part, the impact of intensified prosecution of fraud.

Brown, the powerful San Francisco Democrat who has been criticized for thwarting reform of the $11-billion system for compensating work-related injuries, told the Senate Industrial Relations and Judiciary committees, that “if nothing else occurs in this session of the Legislature” to reform workers’ compensation, lawmakers must enact additional anti-fraud reforms.

Brown said he decided not to include his bill as part of a reform package now being worked on because comprehensive bills often fail in the Legislature or are vetoed by governors because fault always can be found to with parts of the proposal.

In the last few years, the Legislature has enacted a series of anti-fraud reforms, including making it a felony to file a false claim or make a false advertisement. Even so, critics of the system say that workers’ compensation mills flourish, recruiting newly unemployed people to be persuaded by unethical doctors and others to file claims for nonexistent injuries.

Among other things, Brown’s bill, which he said was inspired by his California economic summit conference last month, would:

* Restrict both the employee and the employer to one medical-legal evaluation by a physician of the injured worker, unless a workers’ compensation judge ordered more evaluations.

* Employ a technique used in the federal war on drugs, allowing local district attorneys to seize “illicit fees” charged by mill operators and use the proceeds to finance additional investigations and prosecutions.

* Enable private citizens to file “bounty hunter” civil lawsuits against mill operators and to keep a portion of the recovery.

* Require physicians to declare under penalty of perjury that their evaluations of workers’ injuries are accurate.