Missouri Workers Comp Medical Treatment 304% More Expensive Than Health Insurance
I forgot to finish this article on Missouri Workers Comp medical treatment that I started at the WCRI Annual Conference two weeks ago. The comparison is still worth examining for medical costs.
NCCI (National Council on Compensation) Insurance headquartered in Boca Raton, FL decided to compare health insurance costs to worker’s compensation medical treatment.
WCRI and NCCI have compared health insurance costs to Worker’s Comp in the past. Check out these articles on those studies.
Health Insurance Treatment Costs Less
Will No Health Insurance Cause Case Shifting?
The NCCI study can be found at this PDF. The study is worth a review and a download. I usually look for any anomalies or outliers. Why? Because that is what I do in my articles.
The NCCI study had changed from before in a few areas including the reduction of radiological study costs.
The one outlier that jumped off the page came from the “Show Me State.” Missouri Workers Comp medical treatment costs, when compared to health, appeared as almost an outlier.
Jurisdictions included in the study were AK, AL, AR, AZ, CO, CT, DC, FL, GA, HI, IA, ID, IL, IN, KS, KY, LA, MD, ME, MO, MS, MT, NC, NE,
NH, NM, NV, OK, OR, RI, SC, SD, TN, UT, VA, VT, and WV. A comparison of 37 states is rather comprehensive.
Most of the states that had no medical fee schedules were more expensive. Medical fee schedules have been covered in the following recent articles.
NCCI used relativities which were likely the best way to compare the data. NCCI covered price and utilization as the two relativities. Check out page 7 of the study for a nice summary comparison.
Please click on the chart for better resolution.
The Missouri Workers Comp medical treatment excessive cost and utilization stand out very quickly in the above chart. How should we assess the 300+% relativity when compared to health insurance costs?
As mentioned earlier, Missouri has no fee schedule in place. States without fee schedules are usually more expensive for Workers Comp. The utilization component in the second column means the number of visits and tests performed occur much more when compared to health insurance.
The next time Missouri Workers Comp Medical is covered in an article by me, hopefully, the state will have enacted medical cost reductions.
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