2025 NCCI State of the Line Podcast – Well Worth 10 Minutes of Your Time
I was stuck in an airport, so I thought I would listen to a great podcast from Donna Glenn, NCCI’s Chief Actuary, and Cristine Pike, NCCI PR and Communications Director. You can find the NCCI State of the Line podcast and transcript here.
Let us look at a few points covered in the podcast.
System Maturity and Fee Schedules
Workers comp medical fee schedules have been a great cost reduction strategy for many years. Almost every state has a medical fee schedule of some sort. The states that do not usually appear in NCCI and WCRI data are some of the most expensive states for workers comp medical treatment.
The huge unspoken advantage of medical fee schedules originates in the claim offices. Medical fee schedules allow adjusters to reserve the files more accurately. Knowing, for example, what a knee surgeon will charge versus having to guess at the Usual and Customary rates makes the file reserving job much easier.
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According to Donna Glenn (NCCI State of The Line Podcast)
But today, fast forward early two thousands to twenty twenty five, we have fee schedules for most medical expense types. So think about physicians and inpatient care, outpatient care, and prescription drugs. And there’s a lot of state variation in these structures, but they are generally very effective.
They are maintained annually or biannually by the regulators within the state governments. So we’ve been collecting medical transactional data from workers’ comp carriers since about twenty ten, and that data is, a, is the most detailed data, but it’s also our freshest data. And it’s we collect that data quarterly, and it’s the power of that information that gives us the details to analyze the cost impacts of changes to medical fee schedules. So we do this with a great deal of precision and leverage the power of that data.
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Disruptors
Another interesting mention in the NCCI State of the Line podcast covered the disruptors to the workers comp system. Payroll fluctuations, such as layoffs, recessions, etc. would reduce the critical payroll figures that are a major part of the Experience Modification system.
I will let you read or listen to Donna’s comments on disruptors.
