March 2008

By Sam Gold
A California Injured Worker

Where else can you kill a person outright, with your gross negligence and greed, and get away scott free without any fear of recrimination or criminal prosecution?

Why in California of course?

It’s called the Workers Compensation system, and this kind of aberrant behavior is facilitated by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, his insurance buddy cronies and his so-called reforms of 2004. Many have died because of this quest for profits, to appease the needs of the corporate few.

Ask Kelley Sedam, formerly of Dinuba, California. She lost her husband Bob, who was a helicopter mechanic with Omni-Flite, whose services were contracted by the California Highway Patrol in Fresno, when AIG Insurance adamantly refused to allow her husband to be referred to a vascular specialist when he developed a blood clot in his shoulder that traveled to his lungs and ultimately killed him. They even denied him his blood thinning medication (Coumadin) for an extended period of time, and then had the audacity to deny his widow a death benefit after he succumbed to his injuries. She’s suing!

Ask Jamie Tracey whose husband David was refused psychiatric and pain management treatment for an acute case of Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Syndrome, despite the pleas of his treating doctor and attorney, which was the result of an injury with his employer Waste Management Inc. at a landfill site. He committed suicide! But she was one of the fortunate ones, she actually collected a death benefit. How does money make up for the love of a husband and partner, a death that could have been totally avoided, had the insurer’s third party administrator, Gallagher Bassett Services (one of the bad boys of Worker’s Comp.) just simply obeyed the law and it’s legislative intent? She left the state!

If these criminal acts were performed anywhere else but in Arnold’s Workers Compensation system, those responsible would be thrown in jail so fast that it would make your head spin! But so many of California employers and insurers hide behind something called the “Exclusive Remedy” that was part of a bargain made almost 100 years ago when the system was created by then Progressive Governor Hiram Johnson.

It is supposed to protect the employer from tort lawsuits in exchange for certain defined benefits, but in almost a century since it was enacted, the employers and their insurers have bastardized and convoluted the system into something that is totally unrecognizable, and what’s worse, have used their political and economic power to take away many parts of that agreement so that the worker gets very little in the form of benefits anymore.