Workers' compensation and work-related illnesses and diseases. Peter S. Barth, with H. Allan Hunt. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. 1982, $8.95
✍ Scribed by Myra Karstadt
- Book ID
- 101442535
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1983
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 68 KB
- Volume
- 4
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0271-3586
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
In recent years, as more and more workers have filed tort and/or compensation claims for illness linked to workplace conditions, workers' compensation for employment-related illness and disease has become a subject of increasing interest.
The issue of workers' compensation for illness is ripe for analysis. An interdisciplinary approach is imperative, since medical, legal, and economic considerations must all be taken into account. Also, public administration expertise is required for evaluation of current compensation systems and, as warranted, design of new ones.
Once employment-relatedness has been established for an illness, a pure workers' compensation scheme would pay the ill worker with no further questions asked. This has not been the case in workers' compensation in the United States, since tort law defenses and other restrictions on recovery, such as use of schedules of illnesses or agents, are part of the system. The percentage of cases in which the worker's claim is contested ("controverted") by the employer is high; contested claims can take months or years to resolve. Administrative inefficiencies, aggravated by political considerations, make it even more difficult for a worker to collect from a compensation system.
Barth and Hunt in Workers ' Compensation and Work-Related Illnesses and Diseases deal with these important issues and cover other related subjects. For instance, the book discusses the limitations on data available for estimating the incidence of occupational disease as opposed to accidents, an important factor in any determination of the magnitude of societal resources that should be devoted to improving compensation systems for employment-related illness. The authors discuss systems used in other countries to compensate ill workers, distinguishing between compensation paid by workers' compensation systems and compensation paid by systems designed to support or provide medical assistance to any ill individual.
This, book deals with a most important aspect of worker health: the end result of failure to prevent occupational disease. A thorough discussion of the shortcomings of compensation systems for occupational illness reinforces the conclusion that "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of workers' compensation.