Workers' compensation: coverage, benefits, and costs, 1982

Workers' compensation provides medical care and income maintenance protection to workers disabled from work-related injury or illness. This program is of considerable interest to the Social Security Administration (SSA) from several perspectives. For example, since 1965 Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) benefits and workers' compensation payments have been integrated. Information on the experience under workers' compensation provides a framework for examining questions concerning gaps and overlaps in the Nation's social insurance system. In addition, since December 1969 SSA has administered claims filed through 1973 under part B of the Black Lung program--the program providing income maintenance protection to coal miners disabled by pneumoconiosis. The workers' compensation experience reported here consists of information on benefits for work-related injury and disease, including data on the combined benefits paid under the entire Federal Black Lung program administered by the Labor Department and SSA.     

Workers' compensation: coverage, benefits, and costs, 1985

The 84.3 million workers protected by workers' compensation laws in 1985 represented 87 percent of all wage and salary workers in that year. Both the amount of benefits paid to workers and the cost of the program to employers rose substantially from 1984 to 1985. Benefit payments totaled $22.5 billion-14.1 percent higher than in 1984 and the largest annual increase since 1978-79. About two-thirds of the payments in 1985 were money payments ($15.1 billion) and the remainder ($7.4 billion) went for medical care for disabled workers. Private insurance companies made nearly three-fifths of these payments and State funds and self-insured employers each paid about one-fifth of the total benefit amount in 1985. For the first time since 1978, the annual growth in employer costs exceeded the growth in workers' benefits, resulting in a slight decrease in the loss ratio for 1984-85. Employer costs were up nearly 17 percent from the previous year, reaching an estimated $29.3 billion. Covered payrolls increased by 7 percent in that same period. Total benefit payments as a percent of payroll also increased noticeably in 1985.     

Workers' compensation program experience, 1981

Although the workers' compensation program covered more workers and paid more in benefits in 1981 than it did a year earlier, the rise in both of these indicators was slightly smaller than those in 1980 and considerably smaller than the increases that took place in the 1970's. Employers paid $22.9 billion in premiums in 1981, less than 3 percent more than the previous year and the smallest annual increase since 1958. The cost-payroll ratio also showed a 12-point drop in 1981, the first such decline since 1959 and a sharp contrast to the almost 9 percentage point average annual rise in the 1970's. The Black Lung program, which made up more than a fifth of the benefit payments under workers' compensation in 1973, accounted for only about an eighth by 1981.     

Workers' compensation: 1980-84 benchmark revisions

The first workers' compensation program was introduced 80 years ago. Its purpose was to compensate occupationally injured workers and their families for lost wages and medical expenses from job-related injury, regardless of fault. Today, each of the State and Federal programs that provides coverage to more than 86 percent of the work force uses a combination of private insurance, State or Federal funds, and self-insurance to meet its benefit obligations. The workers' compensation program is of continuing interest to the Social Security Administration (SSA) for several reasons. Since 1965, Social Security Disability Insurance benefits have been subject to reduction if such benefits, when combined with those provided under workers' compensation laws, exceed 80 percent of the worker's earnings. Because the two programs have gaps in protection as well as duplication in coverage, a periodic review of the workers' compensation program is necessary. In addition, SSA administers Part B of the Black Lung program--established to provide income-maintenance protection to coal miners disabled by pneumoconiosis--to about 1 million beneficiaries whose claims were filed before July 1973. This article provides revised benchmark data on the workers' compensation programs and presents a review of program operations during the early 1980's.     

Workers' compensation and the governance of pain

This article examines the medico-legal systems of workers' compensation. It is divided into three parts, the first taking an historical perspective to locate the first workers' compensation laws, the circumstances which led to their implementation, and their consequences in terms of the shift from individual fault to industrial risk. In the second part, the discursive practices of medico-legal knowledge-power typically found in workers' compensation systems are examined, especially the principles and clinical practices that are deployed to 'police' the boundaries of such schemes and to mitigate costs. Part three then summarizes the effect of neo-liberal governmentality and its underlying economic rationality as it attempts to regulate, by means of the artifice of liberty, the behaviours of firms and workers. Workers' compensation deserves analysis for the special technical and insurantial problems it entails, given its complex triangular insurance relation (involving the insurer, the firm, and the worker), its deployment of medical, economic and actuarial knowledges, and its production of special problems and uncertainties surrounding the governing of a class of persons incapacitated for productive work.     

Workers' compensation, Social Security Disability Insurance, and the offset: a fact sheet

This article offers a brief summary of the workers' compensation and Social Security Disability Insurance programs. Information highlighted includes the differences between the two programs' types and terms of coverage. It compares the differing patterns in workers' compensation and Social Security disability benefits as a percentage of wages over the past few decades and considers the potential causes for such trends. The article also explains the offset provision included in the 1965 Social Security Amendments, the intention behind the offset, and how and when offsets are applied.     

Workers' compensation: a background for Social Security professionals

This article provides a brief history and background of workers' compensation programs for occupationally injured and ill workers in the United States. It presents the basic principle involved in workers' compensation and briefly discusses the disability benefits to which workers are generally entitled. It also discusses why there are settlements in this disability program and the availability of information about the amounts paid in workers' compensation cases for obtaining an offset for Social Security Disability Insurance benefits paid to the worker. Finally, the article explains the rationale behind the public policy on coordination of Disability Insurance and workers' compensation in the new paradigm of disability and return to work.     

Workers' compensation: 1984-88 benchmark revisions.

About 93.1 million workers were covered under workers' compensation laws in 1988--an increase of 11 percent from the 1984 total. Benefit amounts totaled $30.7 billion--an increase of about 56 percent since 1984. Of the total payments made under the workers' compensation program, $17.6 billion went to disabled workers, $1.6 billion to their survivors, and $11.5 billion for medical care. The Social Security Administration (SSA) is interested in measuring economic security in the United States, and workers' compensation plays a large role in that measurement. This article represents one part of our overall effort to determine the roles the various income-maintenance programs play in helping citizens of the United States achieve economic security. The figures presented here provide readers with an opportunity to review workers' compensation program operations during much of the 1980's. Workers' compensation is also important to SSA because that program is directly related to the Social Security Disability Insurance program. Since 1965, Social Security disability benefits have been subject to reduction if the beneficiary also receives workers' compensation and the combined benefits exceed 80 percent of previous earnings. In addition, SSA has been directly involved in providing income maintenance for disability from work-related diseases since 1969 when the Federal Black Lung benefits program was established.     

Pension coverage and benefits, 1972: findings from the retirement history sutdy

This article, based on data from the Retirement History Study, examines coverage by an employee pension plan on the longest job and the extent to which covered workers received an employee pension upon retirement and the size of their benefits. It also examines the joint receipt of employee pension and OASDI benefits and the size of the combined benefits. Each of these pension variables is analyzed for differences by class of worker (private wage and salary or government), sex, and characteristics of the longest job (industry, occupation, tenure, recency of job, extent of employment, and annual earnings rate). The majority of completely retired individuals in their early to middle sixties in 1972 did not receive employee pension benefits in that year. Women employed in private industry on their longest job were the most disadvantaged in this regard. Even when they were fortunate enough to receive retirement benefits from employee pension plans, their benefits were substantially lower than those of men or of women employed in government.     

Discounting the benefits and costs of environmental regulations

This paper develops a two-stage procedure for discounting the benefits and costs of environmental regulations that is a variant of the shadow price of capital approach. Under this approach, the capital costs imposed by a regulation are annualized using the marginal rate of return on capital and then both benefits and costs are discounted using the social rate of time preference. This approach yields results that differ significantly from those of conventional discounting when benefits occur with a substantial lag or when benefits are long term.     

Evaluating the benefits and costs of the job corps

Social programs have a wide variety of effects and often have the explicit objective of improving the economic status of the people they serve. In order to be useful to policymakers, benefit—cost analysis of social programs should explicitly take account of these two important program features. The approach used in this analysis of the benefits and costs of the Job Corps does this and provides a useful methodology for evaluating other social programs. According to the analysis, the program has substantial net value for society as a whole as well as for the average Corpsmember.     

The participatory principle in development projects: the costs and benefits of cooperation

Many development theorists and practitioners, including those in key agencies like the World Bank and UNDP, now see participation as critical to successful project implementation, and strongly support cooperative organizational systems. This article cautions against undue optimism about such forms of organization, and attempts to explain their limited success when they compete with private firms by applying rational choice theory to behaviour in cooperative systems. It examines the relevance of assumptions of self interest, opportunism and bounded rationality in such solidaristic organizations, then uses them to calculate the costs and benefits of using participatory systems. It shows that these costs are likely to outweigh the benefits in large organizations unless participatory processes are effectively associated with managerial autonomy, appropriate incentives, sanctions and hierarchies. © 1996 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The 'paradox of enrollment': Assessing the costs and benefits of party memberships

Abstract. From Duverger onward, students of party organization have failed to address systematically the question of what party members actually do for 'mass' parties. This article argues that a clearer understanding of the particular reasons why parties want to have members can help us better interpret ongoing changes in relations between specific party organizations and individual party members. This article lists a wide range of arguments that parties are most likely to make concerning the costs and benefits of memberships. Which of these types of arguments a specific party highlights has implications about the types of members it is looking to attract, and about what the party will be willing to offer to attract such members. The article concludes with a discussion showing how the perspective developed here can be used to illuminate recent changes in several German and British political party organizations, changes which, by themselves, may appear to be isolated and meaningless organizational details.     

Firm size and regulatory compliance costs: The case of workers' compensation insurance

This paper examines the relative costs of workers' compensation insurance across firm-size groups, with particular focus on administrative scale economies (“compliance effects”) and biases in rate-setting (“enforcement effects”). Analyzing data on premiums and losses from the insurance industry, the authors find that the costs of insurance per dollar of loss are relatively high for very small firms. These higher costs reflect certain fixed administrative costs insurance companies must bear, but for extremely small firms these higher costs tend to be mitigated by an “enforcement” bias in state rate-setting outcomes. Due to imperfect experience-rating of insurance premiums, middle-sized firms—which have the highest losses—pay less per dollar of loss than either the smallest or largest firms. Indeed, it appears that large firms purchasing commercial workers' compensation insurance subsidize other size groups.