Court Opinion

ID: 9797473
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 04:21:47.748234+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T08:56:21.438286
License: Public Domain

HODGES, J.,
dissenting, with whom WATT, V.C.J. and BOUDREAU, J. join.
T1 In 1915, Oklahoma workers and employers became parties to an "industrial bargain" imposed by statute. Employers gave up their common law defenses of contributory negligevice, assumption of risk, and the fellow servant doctrine. They received fixed no-fault liability. Employees gave up their common law right to sue in district court. In return they received wage benefits and medical care as their exclusive remedy under the Workers' Compensation Act.
T2 The cost of these benefits is placed on the consumer through the medium of insurance, the premium cost of which is passed on in the price of products or services An employer may purchase workers' compensation insurance or elect, under certain criteria, to become self-insured. Insurers, or employers functioning as an insurer, have never been parties to the industrial bargain.
T3 Today, this Court extends the exclusive remedy provisions of the Workers' Compensation Act to insurers, thus relieving them of their common law duty to deal fairly and act in good faith, This gift to workers' compensation insurers is not authorized by the Act, nor is it supported by precedent. To the contrary this Court has noted that "the exclusivity provision of the statute relates to the liability of the employer-not that of the insurer." - Goodwin v. Old Republic Insurance Co., 828 P.2d 431, 432 (Okla.1992).
T4 Section 42(A), as this Court held in Lum v. Lee Way Motor Freight, 757 P.2d 810, 818 (Okla.1987), "sets forth the sole remedy available when there is a failure to pay compensation due under the terms of an award." Lum, however, did not involve an insurer. It enforced a guaranty of a parent corporation for payment of the workers' compensation awards of the employees of its defunct trucking company. Nothing in Lum or in any of the decisions relied upon by the majority addressed the issue of whether the industrial bargain extends to workers' compensation insurers or employers acting as the functional equivalent of an insurer. See Whitson v. Oklahoma Farmers Union Mut. Ins. Co., 889 P.2d 285, 287 (Okla.1995) (exelu-sivity provision "applies expressly to employ*379ers, although not to workers' compensation carriers"); Harter Concrete Prods. v. Harris, 592 P.2d 526, 528, (Okla.1979) (employer could not be joined as third party in workers' personal injury action against product manufacture in view of exclusive remedy provision). There is simply no reason that a workers' compensation insurer or its fune-tional equivalent should be exempt from the duty of good faith and fair dealing imposed on every other insurer.
T5 Today's extension of the industrial bargain to insurers is legally unjustified for another reason. An insurer's refusal to deal fairly and act in good faith is an intentional tort. Buzzard v. Farmers Ins. Co., Inc., 824 P.2d 1105, 1109 (Okla.1991). As such, it lies wholly outside the no-fault mechanism of workers' compensation.
16 Workers' compensation was constructed to address "accidental personal injury." Okla. Stat. tit. 85, § 11 (2001). That jurisdictional element of a workers' compensation claim is missing when an insurer or a self-insured employer willfully inflicts injury by refusing to pay an award out of animosity towards the claimant or the Workers' Compensation Court. In such a situation, the injured worker should be allowed to seek redress for the insurer's conduct in the district court.
T7 This Court has never indicated that a self-insured employer is entitled to the benefit of the Act's exclusive remedy provision when, while acting as an insurer, it wrongfully and intentionally refuses to pay a workers' compensation award. I would hold that a workers' compensation insurer or a self-insured employer standing in an insurer's shoes faces liability for its bad faith refusal to pay the for medical care or wage benefits provided in a workers' compensation award.