The 2011 Florida Legislature

Monday, June 13, 2011 | 0

By the Florida Workers' Compensation Institute

In a legislative year marked significantly by the measures that failed, the Florida Legislature nonetheless passed some significant bills affecting workers’ compensation in 2011. Senate Bill 2132 addresses return-to-work issues in state employment. House Bill 7095 revives Florida efforts to establish a statewide electronic database known as a prescription drug monitoring program (PDMP). Finally, House Bill 723 provides limitations on injuries that occur outside of Florida.

Titled “Extraterritorial Reciprocity in Workers' Compensation Claims,” HB 723 provides:

If an employee in this state subject to this chapter temporarily leaves the state incidental to his or her employment and receives an accidental injury arising out of and in the course of employment, the employee is, or the beneficiaries of the employee if the injury results in death are, entitled to the benefits of this chapter as if the employee were injured within this state.

This provision restates exiting application of the Florida Workers’ Compensation Statute. However, the Bill further provides that if an employee from another state is similarly in Florida temporarily, and injured during that time, the employer is “exempt” from Chapter 440 if the employer “has furnished workers' compensation insurance coverage under the workers' compensation insurance or similar laws of the other state,” and the “extraterritorial provisions of this chapter are recognized in the other state,” and “employees and employers who are covered in this state are likewise exempted from the application of the workers' compensation insurance or similar laws of the other state.”

Essentially, there must be reciprocity of state’s laws. If the state where the injury occurred has provided by law for their residents to be covered by their law, when temporarily out-of-state, then likewise a Florida employee injured in that state may be limited to Florida workers’ compensation. According to the House of Representative’s staff analysis, “at least 11 jurisdictions recognize another state’s extraterritorial provisions under limited conditions.” These are: California, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Washington and the District of Columbia.

Titled “Prescription Drugs,” HB 7095 is intended to address “the problem of prescription drug abuse in Florida.” House staff analysis. According to the staff analysis:

The bill bans dispensing of Schedule II and Schedule III controlled substances by a physician and makes such dispensing both a third degree felony and grounds for licensure discipline. Dispensing physicians must return existing inventories of these controlled substances to the wholesale distributors from which they were purchased within 10 days of enactment of the bill, or turn in all inventories to law enforcement to be destroyed. Wholesale distributors are required to buy back the controlled substances at the practitioner’s purchase price.

According to the Drug Enforcement Agency, (http://www.justice.gov/dea/pubs/scheduling.html), Schedule II includes medications such as codeine, Hydrocodone, Dilaudid, Methadone, Oxycodone and others. Schedule III includes codeine compounds, Hydrocodone compounds and others.

This bill “makes such dispensing both a third-degree felony and grounds for licensure discipline.” House staff analysis. Physicians who have inventories of these controlled medications will have to return those inventories to the distributers from whom they were purchased, and the wholesaler distributers are required to repurchase those inventories. The effects of this bill are intended to be immediate. The Department of Health is directed by the Legislature to “declare a public health emergency on the third day after enactment of the law.” House staff analysis. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement and local police are authorized to secure unreturned inventories of these pharmaceuticals until they are returned to the wholesale distributors. The inventories become “contraband” on the tenth day following enactment of the law.

HB 7095 also “creates a standard of care for all physicians prescribing controlled substances for treatment of chronic non-cancer pain, regardless of setting, and provides an exemption for physicians meeting certain requirements.” House staff analysis. Dispensers of these medications currently are obligated to report the dispensing to the state database within 15 days; the bill reduces that time to seven days. HB 7095 refines who may dispense these medications, creates a standard of care in chronic pain situations, and reinforces the state database by requiring more contemporaneous reporting of the patient receiving these medications.

SB 2132 requires that “all state agencies with more than 3,000 full-time employees that are insurance coverage from the Division of Risk Management, within the department, establish and maintain return-to-work programs for injured state workers.” Senate Staff Analysis. This has a broad application, affecting the Agency for Persons with Disabilities, the state court system, the Department of Financial Services, the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, the Department of Health, the Department of Revenue, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Corrections, the Department of Children and Family Services, the Department of Juvenile Justice, the Department of Education, the Department of Environmental Protection, the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, and Florida Atlantic University, Florida International University, Florida State University, University of Central Florida, and University of Florida.

Additionally, the Division of Risk Management will begin to use each agency’s “claims history” in determining the premiums for workers’ compensation coverage for that agency. Risk Management will also perform regular evaluations of agency risk management programs every five years, and will provide state agencies with recommendations for those agency programs.

Efforts to alter the composition of the Florida Supreme Court, to alter the involvement of The Florida Bar in judicial appointments, and to reduce funding for the courts all fell short of passage this session.

This column was reprinted from the Florida Workers' Compensation Institute's newsletter. The full document is available here: http://www.workcompcentral.com/pdf/2011/misc/fwcinewsletter.pdf