Profits of the insurance companies have to come from somewhere and they come on the backs of injured workers and their families. Labor strongly believes three-way industrial insurance in any form is the most dire threat to injured workers and our workers compensation system that exists. In private industry, competition is socially wholesome. In a social insurance program like workers' compensation, it has proven to be wasteful and destructive. There are reams of evidence that injured workers are the ones who pay the price in the other states that have allowed three-way.
Insurance companies say they can cut costs.
The biggest cost of workers compensation is benefits. The only way to significantly cut costs is to reduce the number of claims, so the incentive to obstruct claims is built right into the system. Our nonprofit State Fund is not under pressure to maintain profit margins or engage in cutthroat competition. It functions not as an adversary, but as a trustee, in evaluating the claims of injured workers. And by all accounts, it is doing the job well.