Grinberg: More Brilliance From Sacramento

Tuesday, February 22, 2022 | 0

Let’s do a quick pop quiz to get our minds working. What weighs more, a pound of gold or a pound of feathers? 

Gregory Grinberg

Now, you might instinctively say that they are equal in weight, but I assure you that a pound of feathers weighs much more. You see, a pound of gold is just a pound of gold, but carrying around a pound of feathers also means carrying around the guilt of what you did to those poor birds.

Well, for those of you who are still with me and haven’t decided to banish me from your life forever, may I respectfully direct your attention to the latest poison slowly emanating from Sacramento? To wit, Senate Bill 213. 

SB 213, the latest in Sacramento’s bizarre crusade to make access to a solvent hospital in California a thing of the past, would define “injury” to include infectious disease, and such an injury would be granted a rebuttable presumption of industrial causation for any “hospital employee who provides direct patient care in an acute hospital.”

Among the conditions that would be so presumed includes methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus skin infections, blood-borne infectious diseases, tuberculosis, meningitis and COVID-19.

The proposed legislation would also create a presumption for a variety of types of cancer, musculoskeletal injuries, post-traumatic stress disorder and respiratory disease.

In other words, if SB 213 becomes law, hospital employees’ skin and contents will be presumed to be injured on an industrial basis, shifting the burden on the defendant to prove that the injury is not industrial. 

Hopefully, SB 213 wakes up to find itself on Bad-Ideas-That-Will-Never-Become-Law Island, and it will certainly not want for friends. At some point, the Legislature needs to stop thinking of employers as some endless piggy bank to be looted.

Many of California’s employers might look at SB 213 and think that hospitals are a special case and that such an attitude of turning employers into involuntary general health insurers will not affect them, but this is not true. California already has various presumptions for law enforcement, firefighters and corrections officers. We saw a widespread COVID-19 presumption apply to all employers in the case of outbreaks, with efforts already growing to delay the sunset of that law. 

Unless Sacramento’s behavior is put in check, the scope and breadth of presumptions will continue to grow, or, at least, I — occasionally called the WC Oracle by the handsome man in the mirror — think so.

Gregory Grinberg is managing partner of Gale, Sutow & Associates’ S.F. Bay South office and a certified specialist in workers’ compensation law. This post is reprinted with permission from Grinberg’s WCDefenseCA blog.