Travelers: Missed Days on Increase

The Travelers is out with its 2025 Injury Impact Report, which the workers’ compensation carrier said reflects three trends: increasing retirement ages, ongoing employee turnover and longer injury recovery times.
The analysis of more than 2.6 million claims compared workers compensation data from the five years leading up to the Covid-19 pandemic with the next five years.
From 2020 through 2024, employees missed an average of 80 workdays per injury, up more than seven days when compared with the previous five-year period.
Injured employees age 60 and older were out of work due to workplace injuries for nearly 97 days, almost 17 more days than the overall average and an increase of 14 days from pre-pandemic years.
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New York State Sen. Jessica Ramos (D-D13) has introduced legislation that would streamline medical provider authorizations for injured employees by podiatrists, chiropractors, and psychologists.
It aims to allow workers’ compensation to cover treatment provided by these professionals for injured employees.
It would remove parallel processes for authorization of those providers, conforming the
processes to the state’s Expanded Provider Law.
References to podiatric, chiropractic, and psychology practice committees would be removed, and replaced with appropriate associations.
Ramos is the chair of the New York State Senate Standing Committee on Labor.
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Long Covid cases dominated all pandemic-related claim payments in California, according to new data from the California Workers’ Compensation Institute.
While long Covid claims comprised only 4.7% of all California workers’ comp COVID claims from accident years 2020 to 2022, those accounted for 82% of Covid claim medical treatment dollars.
The data refers to cases that involved medical treatment beyond 90 days from the injury date.
Based on a review of 126,397 insured and self-insured COVID-19 claims, the group found that most were relatively inexpensive due to little to no medical intervention (only 14.6% involved medical treatment), but nearly 6,000 of them were Long Covid claims that involved long-term medical conditions that impeded or prevented the claimants from returning to their jobs and resulted in significant costs, according to a June 3 announcement.
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