Ahh. Unfortunately I’m not listening to the radio much on SM’s anymore but I’ll bet our local cowboy channel carries it.
https://m.cnn.com/en/article/h_cee3d6869ee9d98a5a6f143ff4f7eefe
In response to a question about gun control, her answer was jarring (and necessary): “Here’s what I think,” she said. “I think that somebody should have required – and this is going to sound very harsh – I think somebody should have required all those members of Congress to go in a locked room – no press, no one else – and look at the autopsy photographs of those babies. And then you vote your conscience. This has become a political issue.”
Says the pro-abortion candidate who would scream the walls down if you dared to show photos of aborted babies to show the horror that is abortion.
I hate a damn hypocrite.
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Could someone who hasn’t looked at or commented on any articles in the NYT for a while (I troll, and now face a paywall) please copy this article? https://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/16/business/crackdown-on-job-injury-costs.html?mtrref=www.bing.com&gwh=CC7D5E430A8EF447070CB566F9631173&gwt=pay
Willie Brown abused the WorkComp system against his own employees and it’s well know in CA workmans comp seminars- I would like to know if he did that stuff at the same time he was porking kamala Harris?
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March 16, 1995, Page 00001 The New York Times Archives
Willie Brown, one of the most powerful politicians in California, recently found himself on the other side of the fence from the working people whose causes he likes to champion.
Shortly after Mr. Brown, the Assembly Speaker for California, invested in an Oakland radio station, almost all the employees filed claims seeking workers’ compensation for the stress they felt about the changes the owners were making. “At that moment,” Mr. Brown told an appreciative audience of insurance executives in New York late last year, “you could be sure that elimination of stress claims was No. 1 on the agenda.”
With the support of Mr. Brown, California overhauled its workers’ compensation system in 1993. One change required that the workplace be the predominant cause of the stress cited in a disability claim, not just a contributing factor of 10 percent or more.
Mr. Brown did not return three telephone calls seeking comment, but such a restriction would have made it much more difficult for the workers at his station to prove that they deserved compensation.
California is not alone. Pushed by businesses and insurers, most state legislatures around the country are reining in growth in the cost of job injuries, now $70 billion a year. They are tightening the eligibility rules for collecting disability benefits, limiting recourse to the courts, attacking fraud, making the workplace safer and in some states cutting benefits.
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The new vigilance in workers’ compensation coincides with a broader effort in the country to free businesses from expensive lawsuits through tort reforms.
Some people wonder whether the crackdown in workers’ compensation has gone too far by denying benefits on technical grounds to workers with real injuries. Already, horror stories are emerging of disabled workers stuck with huge, unpaid medical bills.
But employers, who pay the bills, and insurers are pleased with the changes. Last year, for the first time since 1970, insurers spent less on claims and other costs for workers’ compensation policies than they collected in premiums – 99 cents on the dollar, down from $1.21 two years earlier. When combined with interest and investment gains, workers’ compensation profits have grown enough for insurers to cut prices in many states and compete for business they once shunned.
As for employers, the growth of workers’ compensation costs has slowed, giving them relief from a financial burden that averages 3 percent of wages but can range as high as 20 percent for workers in high-risk occupations.
These are among the changes that have produced striking results:
*Connecticut no longer awards disability benefits for mental or psychological disorders unless they are the result of an injury. It has eliminated cost-of-living adjustments on disability benefits and has cut some benefits by a third. Insurance premiums in the state have fallen 24 percent in the last two years.
*Texas tightened the eligibility for temporary income benefits. For severely injured workers, it instituted guidelines designed by the American Medical Association to measure the extent of a disability. As a result, even though the number of injuries rose to 283,000 in 1993 from 251,000 in 1991, the number of workers with severe injuries who qualified for special supplemental payments plummeted to 39 from 1,055. Texas also restricted legal appeals by workers of rulings by compensation boards.
*Arkansas required workers to identify the day and time of injuries, a simple measure that state officials say has reduced fraudulent claims. “Before that, workers could just say they got hurt on the job and that was the end of it,” said Lee Douglass, the Arkansas insurance commissioner. The state also adopted a medical-fee schedule and mandated a safety program for employers. In January insurance rates fell by more than 12 percent. And 40 insurance companies are doing business in the state, up from six before the reforms.
*California set up a fund, financed by employers, that pays for special teams to go after fraud. Job-injury claims declined to 8.4 for every 100 workers last year, from nearly 10 in 1992.
For many business people, the changes legislated by the states could not come too soon. Karen Keiko White, president of Summit Installation in Gardena, Calif., said she “seriously considered leaving the state” a few years ago, when her business got an insurance bill for $338,000 for 25 workers.
Ms. White had just doubled her work force to install shelves in the Los Angeles library, which had been damaged by fire. But because of a serious injury to one worker a year earlier and a history of other claims she regarded as fraudulent, the insurance cost for each worker had more than doubled.
Her workers’ compensation bill, for which she later negotiated a reduction of $100,000, has come down further – she would not say by how much – since the California overhaul in 1993. “I haven’t seen a fraudulent claim in two years,” she said, adding that the company had also hired an adviser to improve safety standards.
But organized labor argues that many of the new state provisions unfairly punish the entire work force for the misdeeds of a few. “The publicity generated by the companies and insurers about fraud has put a stigma on workers’ compensation,” said James Ellenberger, assistant director for safety and health at the A.F.L.-C.I.O.
Thomas Sheehan, a former administrative law judge in the Texas workers’ compensation system and now a lawyer in Amarillo, Tex., said most cases were settled fairly. “But you still see cases where people are victimized by insurance companies that are too zealous in fighting claims,” he said.
Mr. Sheehan cited a client who suffered permanent hearing loss in both ears in an explosion. The client was denied supplemental benefits on a technicality, Mr. Sheehan said: The new Texas standards for measuring a hearing disability compare the hearing in one ear with the hearing in the other. “That case could perhaps be overturned in an appeal,” Mr. Sheehan said, “but that costs money.”
Another case shows the vulnerability of workers in states in which insurers and employers delay settlements. Loretta C. Shelton, a new worker at a cardboard-cutting factory in Axton, Va., accidentally activated a cutting machine while reaching into it to move a piece of cardboard, amputating her right hand, government records show.
The owner of the plant, Brown Products Inc., a packaging concern in Atlanta, and its insurance company, Zurich Insurance, successfully fought her claims for nearly two years on the ground that Ms. Shelton was guilty of “willful misconduct” for ignoring previous safety warnings, the records show. By the time Zurich agreed to pay the medical bills and disability compensation, Ms. Shelton had to forgo crucial treatment and therapy for her reattached hand.
Mr. Ellenberger of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. complained that state legislatures and regulators were not showing the same zeal in pursuing “the greatest problems with fraud, which are at the companies and insurers.” Companies, for example, might hire workers off the books, with no compensation insurance, or misclassify them in low-risk occupations that are less expensive to insure, he said.
Richard D. Levy, staff counsel for the Texas branch of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said the efforts in Texas to reduce the involvement of lawyers in the system, while laudatory on the surface, tipped the balance too much in favor of industry.
“The new system is easy for insurance companies to manipulate,” Mr. Levy said. In Texas, insurance companies are more than twice as likely as workers to take lawyers with them to hearings, he said. “It’s not fair to have an injured worker go up against insurance company lawyers,” he said.
Geoff Smith, a vice president at the insurer ITT Hartford, said he did not buy that argument. He said that reducing the role of lawyers was important to assure fairness; in some cases that have gone to juries, he said, lawyers had pocketed big fees, while “some severely injured people were not getting adequate compensation or care, while many people with injuries of low severity were getting more than they should have.”
Even some people in the insurance industry’s camp question some recent changes. John D. Copeland, a lawyer in Fayetteville, Ark., who often represents insurers, wrote in the Arkansas Law Review last year that in reaction to abuses by some workers, “the pendulum has now swung too far in favor of employers.”
In an interview, Mr. Copeland warned that employers might have gone so far in curtailing disability benefits that they might be setting themselves up for a new generation of tort claims through the courts that could be much more expensive than settlements through the workers’ compensation system.
But cutting benefits is not the only way to reduce the costs of workers’ compensation. Employers are making accident prevention a big part of their efforts to cuts costs, often with a push from state legislators. In some states, like Oregon, in which the number of injured workers has declined even as the work force has grown, companies are required to create safety committees. There is also increasing surveillance by the state-run occupational safety boards.
Employers have an interest in keeping injuries to a minimum, because their safety records help to determine the size of their premiums.
Companies are also reducing costs by getting more involved in the handling of workers after injuries, demanding a say in the medical treatment, rehabilitation and return to work. For example, Ryder System Inc., the truck-leasing company based in Miami, hired nurses to work as case managers and monitor the treatment of injured workers. The claims department at the company is expected to treat injured workers as courteously “as if they were customers,” said Tad G. DeOrio, a vice president at Ryder. The hope, he said, is that “workers are not confused and do not feel the need for a lawyer.”
Ryder has also worked to promote safety. The upshot: The number of workers’ compensation claims at Ryder has fallen by half since 1990.
Despite the big changes in much of the country, many populous states, like New York and New Jersey, have yet to take strong action. In New York, for example, insurers are lobbying for the State Assembly to weaken a law that allows workers to sue the makers of machinery that injures them on the job. Such lawsuits in the last 11 years have accounted for about a half of 1 percent of all workers’ compensation cases, but have resulted in more than 11 percent of workers’ compensation costs, or $1.8 billion.
William D. Hager, president of the National Council on Compensation Insurance in Boca Raton, Fla., said the reforms in some states were reminding others that “their economic development hinges on keeping the workers’ compensation system healthy.”
Recently, he noted, legislators in Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee asked his group for recommendations. He said he had told them all the same thing: Reduce the incentives for lawsuits, use objective standards for measuring the extent of disabilities and control medical costs.
A version of this article appears in print on March 16, 1995, on Page D00001 of the National edition with the headline: Crackdown on Job-Injury Costs. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
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Thank you very much!
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You’re welcome very much! You could “like” me very much! 
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Not just that but given the whole idea that people are somehow better represented by those who look like them, why it may as well be impossible to seat a jury to stand judgment over any black defendant that doesn’t include black jurors, one could look at the conviction rate as evidence that black people are fed up with that crap and when it’s them in the jury box they are very willing to vote to convict.
Since it takes just one to prevent conviction I’m gonna say that many black persons second guessing justice while outside the courthouse have not considered that these conviction rates are not evidence of racism at all. But when you aren’t the one sitting in the jury box it’s probably easier to only see race rather than the individuals involved.
It is interesting to not that right after Willie Brown changed CA work comp law to shield his newly acquired Oakland radio station from Work Comp stress claims, Harris was providing stress relief services for ‘Da Mayor’, and he magnanimously, appointed her the overseer of any such future claims. She’ such a champion of the little guy.
From a
NYT article: " Shortly after Mr. Brown, the Assembly Speaker for California, invested in an Oakland radio station, almost all the employees filed claims seeking workers’ compensation for the stress they felt about the changes the owners were making. “At that moment,” Mr. Brown told an appreciative audience of insurance executives in New York late last year, “you could be sure that elimination of stress claims was No. 1 on the agenda.”
With the support of Mr. Brown, California overhauled its workers’ compensation system in 1993. One change required that the workplace be the predominant cause of the stress cited in a disability claim, not just a contributing factor of 10 percent or more.
Mr. Brown did not return three telephone calls seeking comment, but such a restriction would have made it much more difficult for the workers at his station to prove that they deserved compensation."
True, it seems that the new meme is that white males should be denied any input on any issue that affects anyone other than white males.
Only women can even speak about “women’s health issues”.
Only liberals can speak about race issues.
If you are religious, all of your views are tainted by your religious affiliation so keep your yap shut.
Only immigrants and liberals can speak about immigration issues.
Did I miss any?
Long time, no hear. It might have been 50 years since I heard it on some AM station in Franklin County, Pennsylvania. Haven’t heard it since.
Wow. Brings back something… thanks.