Pennsylvania Pols Mull Expanding Fund Offers

A Pennsylvania State legislator is seeking to expand the remit of the State Workers’ Insurance Fund, to begin offering health insurance, which individuals or businesses could purchase for their employees.
The fund was established to provide a workers’ compensation program for Pennsylvania businesses that could not access workers’ compensation insurance in the private sector.
“By allowing SWIF to offer health insurance as a public option, it would make a quality insurance product available to Pennsylvanians at a lower cost than current private insurance rates because of its lower administrative overhead. Another public option would also create more competition within the health insurance market to help drive rates down,” said Rep. Robert Freeman (D-Northampton).
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Officials in North Dakota said the state’s “Get Home Safe” program is gaining momentum in making workplace safety a shared daily value.
From fiscal year 2023 to 2024, there were 1,086 fewer claims filed in the state, while the number of covered workers during that period rose to 10,518.
In fiscal year 2024, the state’s department of Workforce Safety & Insurance processed more than 17,000 injury claims.
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Nationally, the coverage of a state’s workers’ compensation program correlated with fatality rates in the construction industry, according to Wayne Gray, an economics professor at Clark University.
According to his research, states with higher fatality rates tended to have programs with longer wait times for injured employees to claim benefits.
States with programs that did not require small businesses to get insurance coverage also tended to have higher fatality rates, he said.
Because many companies in the construction industry are small, they could forgo workers’ compensation insurance in states that did not require it, Gray said.
“Being covered by workers’ compensation insurance means that, if there’s an accident, it’s going to be costly for you,” he said. “Maybe that’s a bigger cost than it would be in a state where you didn’t have to have workers’ compensation insurance.”
The increased cost of injury might encourage businesses to enact more safety measures, Gray said.
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The CEO of Power Mobility Doctor Rx (DMERx) is among those recently convicted for operating a platform that generated false doctors’ orders to defraud Medicare and other federal healthcare benefit programs of more than $1 billion.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Gary Cox and his co-conspirators connected pharmacies, durable medical equipment suppliers, and marketers with telemedicine companies that would accept illegal kickbacks and bribes in exchange for signed doctors’ orders transmitted using the DMERx platform.
The DME suppliers and pharmacies that paid illegal kickbacks in exchange for these doctors’ orders billed Medicare and other insurers more than $1 billion.
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