Well, the holiday season is officially upon us. The decorations are coming out, turkeys are being administered last rights, and by the end of this weekend some retail employee somewhere will have been trampled to death by an idiot mob in pursuit of cheap televisions. Ah, the holidays….. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, most of…

I stumbled across a news story out of Texas recently that surprised me a bit. It concerned a woman who had been denied treatment for her wrist by Medicare, because she had an open workers’ comp claim in the state. Even with all the talk and hullabaloo over Medicare and MSA’s the last few years,…

Over 15 years I’ve attended what feels like a million conferences, and about a billion individual conference sessions. While there is a plethora of quality content available across the nation, in many situations the content for me is of a “been there, heard that” variety. That is not a criticism, just the lament of someone…

It turned out to be one of the most remarkable birthdays of my life, although the fact it was my birthday was a happy coincidence. I spent last evening with a group of SAIF employees, finally having the opportunity to put some “faces to the nameless” that I have come to know through the ongoing…

In a live demonstration of the importance of workplace safety, the nations attention yesterday was riveted on two unfortunate window washers after they became stranded on a partially collapsed platform 700 feet over Manhattan. These two hard-luck cleaning engineers found themselves dangling precariously off the side of One World Trade Center, the tallest building in…

For those of us who have been following the saga of John Plotkin and his unexpected termination from Oregon Insurer SAIF, we appear to have entered the eye of the storm – the quiet period where we anxiously wait in anticipation of whatever comes next. It is that phase beyond the initial shock and anger,…

It must be November, because I am going to be yet another year older; and I am once again headed to Las Vegas. Next week is the 23rd Annual National Workers' Compensation and Disability Conference, being held November 19th thru 21st at Mandalay Bay. It is the annual sojourn that many of us make to…

I had the honor of working on a pretty unique project earlier this year, and I have been unable to write about it publicly until now. The International Association of Industrial Accident Boards and Commissions (IAIABC) publishes an annual Peer Review Journal, and the editor, Robert Aurbach, asked me to participate in a series to…

I traveled to Toronto this weekend to attend the funeral of an uncle, my father’s brother. I flew from Sarasota, and met my almost 95 year old father who was flying in from New Mexico to attend the services.  Even though he still drives and owns two businesses, he suffered a fall a few years…

I am not a particularly handy person around the house. Fortunately for me, what I lack in actual ability for home repair I make up for with an eternal optimism about my capabilities. This compensatory effect, however, is not shared by my wife. It does not prevent her from normally leaving the house when these…