By Gregory Grinberg
Tuesday, April 13, 2021 | 0 | 0
Are we now all experts on the new medical and legal fee schedule? Allow me to ask you a simple but utterly terrifying question: Do you enjoy a network of medical providers?
Gregory Grinberg
Most of the time the answer is a resounding “yes” and do you know why? Having an MPN in the California Workers Compensation System is entirely voluntary. If you want to enjoy the quack from your claims counter, simply cancel your MPN and have applicants deal with the “doctor” his attorney made a wink and secret handshake agreement with.
Now that we have the square, there is terror and fear. In Sacramento, Congregation Majority Leader Eloise Gomez Reyes and Congregation Leader Lorena Gonzalez, both Democrats, introduced AB 1465 to create a California network for medical providers.
My dear readers may recall that Gonzalez is the elected California state official who responded to Elon Musks’ intention to leave California because of the COVID-19 lockdown rules by tweeting “F * ck Elon Musk” and also drove the passage from AB 5, which was severely restricted to the worlds of “Independent Contractor” and “Gig Economy”.
AB 1465 would establish a nationwide network of medical providers known as CAMPN and add Section 4617 to the Labor Code, which in subsection (b) provides that “the injured worker can opt for treatment with a doctor [the employer’s] MPN or HCO or may choose to treat with a doctor at CAMPN. “
In other words, the employer’s control over medical treatment by an MPN is effectively removed as an injured worker can treat in the CAMPN and the employer has no control over who is in the CAMPN.
In fact, subsection (d) lists the requirements for admitting a doctor to the CAMPN, and there aren’t many of them: a good reputation, a valid and active license, and adherence to the agreement, fee schedule, and registration requirements.
The MPN is an instrument to keep costs low and at the same time provide medical treatment for injured employees. However, this back-door approach makes this tool meaningless as any doctor who accepts an injured worker as a patient is likely to be accepted into the CAMPN.
Hopefully there is enough sense in Sacramento to see that while a sheep can be exposed many times, it can only be skinned once. Every time Sacramento raises the price of stopping the light for California businesses, more and more of them decide it’s time to close shop and move on. Using the Workers’ Compensation System to further destroy California businesses is not a successful strategy for creating wealth for Californians.
But that’s just my opinion, of course, and until there’s a Californian referendum that gives me lifelong veto power over the legislation, that stance isn’t exactly binding.
Gregory Grinberg is the managing partner of Gale, Sutow & Associates’ SF Bay South office and a certified employee compensation law specialist. This post was reprinted with permission from Grinberg’s WCDefenseCA blog.
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