NWCDN Members regularly post articles and summary judgements in workers’ compensations law in your state.
Select a state from the dropdown menu below to scroll through the state specific archives for updates and opinions on various workers’ compensation laws in your state.
Contact information for NWCDN members is also located on the state specific links in the event you have additional questions or your company is seeking a workers’ compensation lawyer in your state.
These criteria are particularly difficult to confirm at the least severe end of the mild TBI continuum, especially when relying on subjective, retrospective accounts. The postconcussive syndrome is a controversial concept because of varying criteria, inconsistent symptom clusters and the evidence that similar symptom profiles occur with other disorders, and even in a proportion of healthy individuals.
The number of designated doctors in the workers’ compensation system continues
to decline while the number of physicians in Texas hits record numbers.
For the state’s fiscal year ended August 31, 2021, the Texas Medical Board
issued a record 5,304 physician licenses. There are currently 94,544 physicians
licensed in Texas.
However, all those doctors are not lining up to take the designated doctor
certification exam. The number of designated doctors continues to shrink.
In January 2020, there were a total of 384 designated doctors. By January
2021, the number had dropped to 318. As of August 2021, we're down to a
total of 272 designated doctors. Source.
Seventy-five of those designated doctors are physicians while the other 197 are
chiropractors. In other words, over two and a half times more chiropractors are
designated doctors than physicians.
It appears that many physicians have made an economic decision that the costs
of being a designated doctor are not worth the benefits while chiropractors are
more incentivized by the current rates. If we want more and better designated
doctors, we may need to pay them more. It’s likely to be less expensive than
the costs associated with bad designated doctor reports.
On February 26 the Texas Supreme Court heard oral argument to determine whether the parents and sister of Fabian Escobedo, a truck driver who died from a rollover accident on the job, may sue the Employer. The Employer argued that recovery of benefits under the Texas Workers’ Compensation Act is the exclusive remedy for Mr. Escobedo and that the parents and sister could not bring a wrongful death action under the gross negligence exception in the Act because that exception authorizes actions only by a surviving spouse or heirs of the body of the deceased. The parents and sister pointed out that the supreme court has previously held that the Act does not bar a deceased’s cause of action forintentional injuries which survive to the estate under the Texas Survival Statute. Accordingly, at issue is whether Mr. Escobedo suffered personal injury prior to deathdue to the Employer’s intentional acts or omissions.
To support their claim, the parents and sister pointed to evidence in the record that (1) oil fields in West Texas and South Texas were booming and the Employer could not keep up with the demand for drivers, (2) drivers were required to work unsafe amounts of overtime, (3) the Employer required drivers to work illegal amounts of time, (4) the Employer required drivers to falsify their driver logs to cover up the illegal hours, and (5) a terminal manager warned a supervisor that a driver would be killed because of the unreasonable driving hours and the supervisor said “we will cross that bridge when we come to it.”
The supreme court has previously held that the intentional failure to furnish a safe workplace does not rise to the level of intentional injury, except when the employer believes his conduct issubstantially certain to cause injury. Thus, in the present case, the task for the supreme court is to decide whether the evidence could support a finding that the trucking company believed its conduct was substantially certain to cause injury to Mr. Escobedo. If so, the parents and sister will be allowed to sue.
The Corpus Christi court of appeals concluded that the evidence in this case could support such a finding. The supreme court’s decision is expected later this year. MO-VAC Service Co. v. Primitivo Escobedo, et al.
The Division of Workers’ Compensation has initiated a review of the “utility and sufficiency” of the standard form interrogatories for contested case hearings. The form interrogatories are sets of questions, prescribed by DWC, that parties may serve in discovery prior to a CCH. There are two sets of form interrogatories, which are Claimant’s Interrogatories to Carrier andCarrier’s Interrogatories to Claimant. They each contain 11 standard questions prescribed by DWC and allow the party to draft 5 additional questions.
The current interrogatories were adopted in 1991 and they are now widely viewed as inadequate. The DWC is requesting comments and suggestions from stakeholders regarding revisions, and it will hold a stakeholder meeting to discuss possible changes on March 31, 2020 at the DWC Metro building in Austin.