The 2006 legislative session is now, at least for the workers’ compensation community, a distant memory. It quietly ended Saturday at midnight with action taken on the few remaining bills that didn’t warrant a carefully orchestrated bipartisan signing ceremony. There were no surprises, and some bills signed into law actually will accomplish something, not always the objective of the work product in the legislature.
Loss ratios for insurers will start to go up – not that anyone will notice – and various challenges facing the system in the form of litigation and regulation will stay under the radar of all but the most dedicated workers’ compensation participants. A low rumbling of discontent will be heard among employers and insurers as implementation continues to be slowed by ill-considered regulations and judicial activism, all conveniently ignored by so-called “advocates” whose complaints about the system failing injured workers sound eerily like calls for undoing the past five years of legislative changes.
In other words, it’s déà vu all over again.
According to most surveys, Governor Schwarzenegger will be reelected. It gives one pause to consider the wisdom of public employee unions coughing up $25 million to say nasty things about “Ahnold” over the next month, but this fool’s errand likely finds support among those who serve the public – kind of an opiate with a really big price tag. Then again, if they drive the governor’s win back down to single digits, then maybe no one ever again will say “PERS reform” – at least not until the state and most local governments are entirely in the tank. But hey, by then we can elect a Democrat as governor and solve everyone’s problems by raising taxes.
Sound familiar? Maybe not, unless you remember the political pyrotechnics that brought us the 1993 reforms. They’ve been reduced to remembrance of the infamous treating-physician presumption – and the political exercise that was the repeal of the minimum rate law.
Politics as usual hasn’t really changed over the past 20 years, the difference being that today’s actors are not nearly as talented as those who were on stage more than two decades ago. Sorry, Fabian, while you do media events with the governor really well, you’re no Willie Brown. But then again, the “Governator” isn’t Pete Wilson, is he? And there’s no one in the third house with the gravitas of Clay Jackson.
Now we are reduced to the “long view” of things. Workers’ compensation is an issue that is a small part of a bigger picture in the eternal struggle between labor unions and employers. It fits in there with FEHA and other employment legislation, creating more employment for plaintiffs’ counsel.
Those who speak for each have little regard for solving problems. Instead, they are more intent on preserving the status quo until one has leverage over the other. In 1998, the unions had leverage and, well, we know what happened. By the time of the recall, the pendulum swung the other way, and Governor Schwarzenegger could blunt the unions’ march to controlling state government and all those who live in the Golden State.
The problem, of course, is that the governor can’t do too much without the legislature, as we saw in the fall of 2005 with the disastrous initiative election. So labor and employers – at least those who are active in Sacramento – continue their long-running show of feigning indignation at each other’s acts.
The session closed on Saturday, Sept. 30, 2006. But this is only intermission. When the curtain rises again in January 2007, you might well ask, “Why the hell am I paying for this ticket?”