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Take Action to Protect Your Right to See Your Own Doctor if You Get Injured at Work!
Our right to see our own doctors if we get injured on the job will terminate at the end of this year, unless SB 186 (DeSaulnier) gets signed into law.
This key bill is on the Governor’s desk awaiting his signature. Please take a minute TODAY to send in a letter of support on this important bill. If the Governor fails to sign SB 186 into law, no workers will be able to see their own doctors if they get injured on the job. We will all be forced to see the company doctor.
rg/tng39521cwa/afl-cio
| Sample Letter for Campaign |
Subject: Sign SB 186 and Preserve Our Right to See Our Own Doctors if we Get Injured on the Job
Dear [ Decision Maker ] ,
I write to support SB 186 (DeSaulnier), an important measure to maintain the right of some injured workers to predesignate their treating physicians and see their own doctors should they get injured on the job.
Your 2004 reforms placed new restrictions on who could predesignate their own doctors. Currently, only workers covered by an employer-provided group health insurance plan can exercise their right to predesignate their regular physicians. These physicians must be the worker's regular physician, maintain their medical records, and agree to be predesignated.
The right to see your own doctor if you get injured on the job is set to sunset on December 31, 2009, unless action is taken. If this limited right is eliminated, workers will have no choice but be forced to seek treatment from the 'company doctor.'
A November 2005 study from the Public Policy Institute of California documents that this limited right to predesignate strikes a balance between employee and employer choice of physicians. It concludes that employer costs are no higher when workers choose a doctor they have a prior relationship with. Yet, employee satisfaction is much higher when workers are allowed to see their own doctors.
Employee satisfaction with their medical treatment helps to eliminate the frictional and litigation costs in the workers' compensation system. Currently, the Workers' Compensation Appeals Board is bottlenecked and overwhelmed with questions of what is appropriate medical treatment. Workers' comp judges shouldn't be in the situation of approving or disapproving medical care, those decisions should be left with doctors that workers have a relationship with and can trust.
Seeing your own doctor does not increase costs in the workers' compensation system. All doctors who treat a workplace injury are paid under a set workers' compensation fee schedule. Doctors' treatment must follow the medical guidelines of the group health network.
On a final note, you and many others have supported the notion of integrated medical treatment. That it shouldn't matter where you get injured, on or off the job, you need to get treatment.
Predesignating your own doctor is the only place that allows the integration, this notion of 24 hour care, to happen. It would be a shame to see it disappear.
For these reasons, I ask that you sign SB 186 into law.
Sincerely,
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