From a contracting notice posted by the Social Security Administration (SSA):
SSA is seeking the assistance of a contractor to conduct an evaluation of the Retaining Employment and Talent After Injury/Illness Network (RETAIN) demonstration projects. RETAIN is a joint demonstration with the Department of Labor (DOL) that will test early interventions to help workers stay at work or return to work after experiencing a work-threatening injury, illness, or disability. The ultimate policy goal is to reduce long-term disability - including the need for federal disability programs - and increase labor force participation among those individuals. ...
RETAIN is loosely modeled on several promising early intervention programs run by the Washington State workers' compensation system, including the Centers of Occupational Health and Education (COHE), the Early Return to Work program, and the Stay at Work program. These programs provide early intervention and return-to-work services for individuals with work-related health conditions. Preliminary results from COHE suggest a significant (26%) reduction in long-term transitions to SSDI. This demonstration will draw from and test key features of these Washington programs, in other states and/or for a population beyond workers' compensation (i.e., for non-occupational injuries and illnesses), and with an increased emphasis on employment-related supports.
Developing and conducting a rigorous evaluation of the interventions is a key component of RETAIN. In this joint demonstration, DOL will award cooperative agreements to states to operate RETAIN projects, and SSA will provide an independent, comprehensive national evaluation of all of the state projects. The national evaluation will include a process analysis, a participation analysis, an impact analysis, and a cost-benefit analysis. As part of the RETAIN evaluation, we will analyze the impact of these programs on the following broad outcomes:
9 comments:
One of the big problems with how Worker's Comp insurers/employers treat injured workers is that they are far more motivated by their own economics than by the injured worker's well-being. Is there a technicality they can use to screw the worker out of benefits? If it is worth their while, count on them to exploit it. Can they stonewall an injured worker to make them give up their claim or settle for a pittance of what the claim is worth? They will often do so. Can they send the worker to a doctor who would have trouble finding something wrong with a dead person, to generate documentation to help them cut off benefits earlier than they should? Mucho dinero saved for the insurance company, too bad for the disposable injured worker.
I'm not saying they are all evil. When it's cheap and easy to get a worker back on the job they sometimes do well. Perhaps SSA can learn from a few of their better practices. I hope SSA will remember that helping the injured worker and helping the workers comp insurer is not always the same thing. In any system where the funder has significant adverse economic interests to the beneficiary, the beneficiary will suffer. That difference is why we need to keep the SSA system government run and non-adversarial.
Start up the chorus of "This will never work because..." the blogs favorite hymn. You are not going to return everyone to work, since that is not possible the blog doesn't want any program and will whine and complain against it.
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Well said, 8:00!
I was going to leave a comment, but then I saw that 8:00 already said what I was going to say.
The insurance industry has undermined state WC programs, and the injured workers have responded by applying for SSD. The WC insurers have effectively shifted the cost of work injuries from themselves to the taxpayers. This will continue to happen unless and until the Feds set national WC standards.
I'm not sure of the logic in suggesting labor retention will result in lower long-term disability claimants/recipients. It might result in lowering short-term disability claimants/recipients, but by definition long-term is a result of conditions which do not resolve quickly.
Unless SSA is just encouraging the disabled to not apply, or encouraging employers to accommodate disability.
I would suggest that many, if not most, SSDI cases do not reflect an inability to perform work at any level. In my personal experience both as an attorney and ALJ, most of the FREVs I've seen are grid cases where the person is over 50/55 and incapable of doing more than sedentary or light work with PRW that exceeds that level without transferable skills. I'm not sure how this specific program would work, but to say that providing work training/programs/incentives to get some people to pursue a different occupation or return to work in a different capacity isn't going to work because you assume every person entitled to disability is incapable of anything is a big stretch. A large chunk of people are on disability because they grid out, not because they're actually incapable of any and all work, though those people certainly exist, too, and this program could not help them.
I don't know the particulars of the RETAIN program. My only caution would be to not to rely on insurance company data about number of people they determined were able to go back to work. Instead, look at number of people who were injured and actually went back to work. There is a significant gap between the number of people the insurance company did not pay benefits to, and the number who actually cannot work, for reasons 8:00 mentioned above.
This Propublica article documents the failures of the workers compensation system and what can happen when government lets private insurers run amok and shift their own costs back onto us taxpayers. https://www.propublica.org/article/the-demolition-of-workers-compensation. Maybe one day there will be an Attorney General with the guts to go after that, like they eventually did with big tobacco. Maybe one day.
My impression, from some peripheral observations of the WC insurance industry, is that carriers typically do not want their WC claimants to file for SSDI. If determined to be "permanently" disabled and unable to work by the federal government, the carrier has less room to negotiate a lower settlement that is financially beneficial to the carrier.
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