What is outrageous about the O’Farrell Government’s attack on injured workers entitlements is that they’ve failed to look at the facts. It is injured workers and the community who bear an overwhelming majority of the costs associated with their injuries or illnesses. Injured workers much more so. Employers (and no doubt insurers), on the other hand continue to get an increasingly free-ride.
Cost of Work-related injury and disease: 2008-2009
According to the 2012 Safe Work Australia report the estimated costs in Australia are:
- employers bear 5 per cent of the total cost – this includes loss of productivity from absent workers, recruitment and retraining costs and fines and penalties from breaches of work health and safety regulations,
- injured workers bear 74 per cent of the costs – costs include loss of current and future income and non-compensated medical expenses, and
- the community bears 21 per cent of the total cost – this includes social welfare payments, medical and health scheme costs and loss of potential output and revenue.
http://wp.me/p1MA9G-3fM
The Insurers and Employers are getting a free ride and yet not one word re Workers Compensation mentioned in the first week of NSW Parliament. Although it may be the elephant in the room that no one will dare speak, I suggest we try and get Tony Windsor to drop in and show the limp wristed NSW politicians how it should be done.
I clearly see a conflict of interest here, politicians must have direct connections/holdings in financial and governmental affiliated companies so how could we ever hope in their honesty???
Last time I looked (2009) Worksafe Victoria was making a massive profit, which they had been feeding back to the employers through a series of annual reductions in premiums. I can safely presume that CGU, my rip-off artist masquerading as a Case Manager also made a substantial profits. Meanwhile, I lost over $600,000 in earning capacity in the years I’ve been affected by workplace injury, and the public purse now has to support me. How shameful is this. Centrelink knows exactly what kind of payouts you receive as an injured worker, and they take their chop from it before you ever see it. Why isn’t the Federal Government putting their lawyers into these situations to make sure that injured workers, who are the responsibility of the various workcover schemes, are compensated adequately to ensure that they do not end up reliant on the public purse. Why is Medicover not investigating the many doctors and medical services who prefer to bill Medicare for the services they provide as they find the Workcover insurers to be too adversarial when it comes to getting their bills paid, and to ensuring their clients get the services they need to recover? It’s not like they don’t know. As I understand it when they had that last Poverty Enquiry, a large number of injured workers fronted up to identify the source of their personal poverty.
It’s a shameful and corrupt system, I many times have experienced Doctor’s or clinic’s rebuffing the bills to Medicare or personal private health insurance because it’s easier and they KNOW they don’t want to waste time and struggle to get money back from CROCKS working for WorkSafe’s licensed insurers.
I “fortunately” had no need to bill Centrelink for weekly payments (this is what Xchanging wanted) as I only lived on my own, but could you imagine how many injured workers MUST relay on the PUBLIC SYSTEM because WorkSafe authorised insurer illegally deny legit claims? And that’s no matter you complain to WorkSafe they DO NOT support your claim!