The comp community was all a-twitter today.
The big buzz? Yesterday’s en banc decisions in Olgilvie and Almaraz and Guzman (see yesterday’s post)
A sample of comments from sources (applicant attorneys, defense attorneys and judges) I spoke with today:
….”Courageous”…..”A slippery slope”….”What took them so long?”……”Finally, the pompous AMA police are put in their place”……”FEC is rebuttable, but is it worth the effort?”……”Could some of this be used as a sword against applicants?”……”Every case in process needs to be rethought”…….”How do I explain the various ramifications of this to my clients?”……”Are we back to where we started a few years ago?”….”This will make the lawyers happy”….It “blows open the doors”…..
“All that crap about so-called correct impairment ratings; the emperor had no clothes”…..”We will see a lot more use of subrosa films to attack medical formulations of impairment”…….”This will be a big bargaining chip in future legislative and regulatory negotiations”….””This was under the radar as people focused on Boughner and Benson”….”Ogilvie is too confusing to be useful”….”Two Court of Appeals Districts could wind up with Almaraz and Guzman; that’s kind of wicked”……”Now we have a hot topic for all of the conventions and continuing ed providers”…..”We’ll see very early on which doctors will insist on applying the AMA very mechanically and which docs will take a more expansive approach to incorporating more detailed descriptions of ratable impairment”….”Functional capacity evaluations are back”…..
In the next couple of posts I’ll analyze these in more depth.
Stay tuned.
Julius Young
www.boxerlaw.com
Category: Understanding the CA WC system
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