Ohio Workers Comp Changing With Recent Court Decision
The Ohio Workers Comp lawsuit result indicated a bad result for the monopolistic carrier. I had posted on this situation November 22nd. If a judge can grasp why the state cannot artificially structure the Workers Comp premium rates for Ohio business, why is the GOP having such a hard time figuring out this simple point?
Surprisingly, GOP lawmakers said they want to preserve a system used by the state to set job-injury insurance rates. This would override a Cuyahoga County judge who recently ordered the Ohio BWC to structure their premium rates similar to NCCI. In my last post on the BWC, a group of businesses had successfully argued that the bureau’s group rating system made their premiums unfairly high. The steep discount received by the large business pools have to be made up somewhere and that is with increasing small business premiums.
Small businesses already take on more of a premium risk, as they cannot spread a loss over a large amount of payroll. Therefore, the system already discriminates against a business with a smaller amount of payroll. This is an acceptable premium slant towards large businesses. There is really no way to level the playing field in a NORMAL Workers Comp premium structure such as NCCI or most of the State Rating Boards. That is the nature of a normal Workers Comp system.
I do not understand why the Ohio Republican party would want to continue a system in which groups of businesses receive unfair, heavily-discounted rates. The large business premiums are subsidized by individual businesses. Republicans want to pass a bill in the final month of the legislative session while they still control both the House and Senate.
This gets back to what I have said many times before in this blog. Monopolistic state funds are being administered like a government agency, not as a Rating Bureau. There have been so many scandals with the Ohio BWC. I recommend that Ohio immediately change to having NCCI oversee their Workers Comp program. West Virginia and Nevada did it with great success.
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