Court Opinion

ID: 9668429
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 02:12:44.920518+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:15:45.391875
License: Public Domain

LAVORATO, Justice,
(concurring specially)-
I reluctantly agree that the scheduled injury provision is not subject to the constitutional infirmity that Gilleland asserts. Nevertheless, I write separately to express my agreement with a prior concurring opinion that this provision is grossly unfair. See Graves v. Eagle Iron Works, 331 N.W.2d 116, 119-20 (Iowa 1983) (McCormick, J., concurring specially).
In Graves, the petitioner, a fifty-three year old married man with four children, suffered *409a leg injury. The doctor gave him a twenty percent impairment of his left leg that translated into forty-four weeks of benefits. Because of his permanent impairment, the petitioner lost his job, a job he had held for twenty-five years. The petitioner urged this court to apply industrial disability — loss of earning capacity — in determining his benefits rather than functional impairment under the scheduled injury provision in Iowa Code section 85.35(2)(u). This court rejected the petitioner’s urging, limiting him to forty-four weeks of benefits even though his work life as he had known it was at an end. Had the court applied the industrial disability formula, the benefits of course would have been substantially greater and eminently more reflective of his true industrial disability.
In a special concurrence, the then Justice McCormick underscored the unfairness of the scheduled injury provision:
As this ease illustrates, no necessary correlation exists in fact between functional loss and industrial disability. Loss of a foot will mean one thing to a person with a desk job and quite another to a person who is trained only in work requiring standing, walking and lifting. But for the fortuity that his injury was to a scheduled member, Graves would have recovered for his actual industrial disability rather than the wholly arbitrary presumed industrial disability under the schedule.
The schedule brings a windfall to the worker in some eases and gross hardship to the worker in others. Although it is argued the schedule has the advantage of simplicity, it is questionable whether that advantage is worth the cost. The result in the present case is indefensible except that it is demanded by an anachronistic statute.
Graves, 331 N.W.2d at 120.
“Anachronistic” is a perfect adjective to describe the scheduled injury provision because it was enacted more than eighty years ago. Just how obsolete, unfair, and medically wrong the schedules are has been described this way:
The origins of the exact numbers of weeks assigned to losses of particular members are lost in the mists of early compensation history. More recently, the American Medical Association undertook a complete reexamination of these arbitrary figures, attempting to bring to bear on them the most modern techniques of estimating the functional loss to the body as a whole represented by loss of a given member. The resulting figures show some significant deviations from traditional schedules in the relative gravity of losses of members.
1C Arthur Larson, The Law of Workmen’s Compensation § 58.11, at 10-492.92 (1993) [hereinafter Larson].
I think the scheduled injury provision is out of step with recent developments in workers’ compensation law. One noted workers’ compensation commentator describes the trend:
Although in many jurisdictions the schedule award is the exclusive remedy whenever applicable, some courts are beginning to treat the loss of specific members as amounting to percentage disabilities of larger members, or of the entire body, when this more fairly reflects the actual effect of the injury.
Larson, § 58.00, at 10-492.78. As our case authority concedes, scheduled permanent partial disabilities are arbitrarily compensa-ble according to the classifications of sections 85.34(2)(a) to (t) without regard to the loss of earning capacity. And the only justification for this method is that it presumably makes certain the amount of compensation in the case of specific injury and it presumably avoids controversies. Dailey v. Pooley Lumber Co., 233 Iowa 758, 760, 10 N.W.2d 569, 571 (1943).
In deciding workers’ compensation cases, we mouth the principle that the workers’ compensation law is to be liberally construed in the employee’s favor. See, e.g., Teel v. McC`ord, 394 N.W.2d 405, 406 (Iowa 1986). To say that the scheduled injury provision is in tune with this principle is a cruel joke.
This court has been chipping away at the unfairness of this provision. See, e.g., Mortimer v. Fruehauf Corp., 502 N.W.2d 12, 17 (Iowa 1993) (a psychological condition caused or aggravated by a scheduled injury is com-pensable as an unscheduled injury). The *410legislature should complete the process we have begun by getting in step with the modern trend to make the scheduled injury provision more fair.