California Court of Appeals, First Appellate District
The First Appellate District of the Court of Appeal of the State of California has affirmed the Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board in Benson v. WCAB and the Permanente Medical Group, affirmed (2/10/2009). The Court of Appeals held, in relevant part, that “[t]he Wilkinson doctrine is inconsistent with the apportionment reforms enacted by Senate Bill No. 899.”
The basic upshot is that barring “limited circumstances” each distinct industrial injury will require its own Award.
First Ogilvie and Almaraz/Guzman, now Benson? Its been an exciting two weeks to be a Workers’ Compensation attorney.
I launched the Ogilvie DFEC Rebuttal Calculator on Saturday morning to a select group of beta-testers. ((By “select group” I mean anyone who asked me if they could help.)) When I upgraded a person’s access to the website they had no problem seeing the workers’ compensation calculator.
Unfortunately, not one of them was able to actually use the thing. Last night my wife suggests the problem might be, “maybe they are using a different version or its not refreshed or something”?
And you know what? She was right. My wife, the hacker. ((Photo courtesy of gutter.))
I’ve written several protections into these calculators to insulate my users from having to deal with problems or bugs from newly installed code. I would much rather a user sees nothing than get a wrong answer. And nothing is exactly what my users saw. I had remembered to allow my beta testers to see the Ogilvie DFEC Rebuttal Calculator – but forgot to give them access to calculator.
So, the beta-test period will continue for another day or two while I await feedback from my users.
How to build a calculator: It's like smashing a calculator - only in reverse
I’m going to delay the launch of the OgilvieDFEC rebuttal calculator for a day or two. ((Photo courtesy of mhuang)) I believe it works just fine, but I would like to test it a little more. This said, I will grant anyone who is interested access to this calculator.
Why the delay? Well…
The interesting thing about taking apart a set of calculations is that you find all sorts of “hidden steps” to the calculation. The majority in Ogilvie does a respectible job of going through the steps of this new formula and even gives several examples.
When performing most calculations one will need to round numbers at some point. However, rounding almost invariably takes place at the very end. In the case of the Ogilvie calculations, it appears that the WCAB rounds various figures throughout the calculation.
Even though the DFEC rebuttal calculator was giving correct answers, the fourth or fifth decimal places on some intermediary figures occasionally did not coming out right. It took me a little while to track down all the spots where the WCAB was implicitly rounding their figures (and to what decimal place!).
At the moment it requires four pieces of information:
FEC Rank (re: body part in question)
Standard disability (re: body part in question)
Post-injury earnings for Applicant
Post-injury earnings for employees similarly situated to Applicant
Once you add in that information, click “Calculate” and it should crunch through the formula and give you a response. The WCAB in Ogilvie suggested several possible outcomes to this formula:
The “Individualized Loss Ratio” for the injured worker is the same or within the range for the current FEC Rank for the affected body part. In this circumstance, the 2005 DFEC has not been rebutted.
The “Individualized Loss Ratio” for the injured worker is within the range of one of the other seven FEC Ranks. Here, the DFEC portion of the 2005 Permanent Disability Rating Schedulemight be rebutted.
The “Individualized Loss Ratio” for the injured worker is outside the range of all eight FEC Ranks. In this circumstance, you could end up with a new FEC Adjustment Factor much higher or lower than any FEC Adjustment Factor associated with the eight FEC Ranks. Here, the DFEC portion of the 2005 Permanent Disability Rating Schedulemight be rebutted.
Obviously, there are innumerable factors that go into considerations of whether a Judge (or the WCAB) would find the DFEC portion of the 2005 Permanent Disability Rating Schedule to be rebutted. This calculation and the information relied upon in performing this calculation cannot be taken as a guarranteed method of rebutting the DFEC portion of the 2005 Permanent Disability Rating Schedule.
Just this last Saturday we reached 300 registered users – and King Leonidas couldn’t be happier. ((You know, King Leonidas from the movie 300. The really happy looking guy to the right.))
