Moment's ago the Sixth District Court of Appeal announced that it was affirming the Workers' Compensation Appeals Board's decision in the Guzman case in its entirety.  This upholds the WCAB case decision which increased workers’ comp costs for California employers.

"We conclude that the language of section 4660 permits reliance on the entire Guides, including the instructions on the use of clinical judgment, in deriving an impairment rating in a particular case," the court noted in its ruling. "The Guides itself recognizes that it cannot anticipate and describe every impairment that may be experienced by injured employees. To accommodate those complex or extraordinary cases, it calls for the physician's exercise of clinical judgment to evaluate the impairment most accurately, even if that is possible only by resorting to comparable conditions described in the Guides. The PDRS has expressly incorporated the entire Guides, thereby allowing impairment in an individual case to be assessed more thoroughly and reliably."

These costs have already been factored into the recent WCIRB rate filing.

Stay tuned for additional coverage.

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