Best Wishes President Obama
Thursday, January 22, 2009 | 0
By Eugene F. Keefe
God bless and protect Barack Obama, the 44th President and Commander-in-Chief of the United States.
We didn't say it would be easy and we hope he is up to the difficult tasks we have given him. He inherits the highest U.S. debt of all time and the worst economy of our lifetimes. We call on all of our readers and all Americans to unite behind our leader to help and protect him in any and every way possible.
We are confident he has the brains, guts and drive to get us out of the current mess, but he needs our help, constructive criticism and support. Expect to see such support and constructive criticism from us.
Lets hope this week's inauguration sent a message to the world that the U.S. is coming back strong.
Synopsis:
Will honesty, fairness and ethics ever hit Illinois government as it relates to workers' compensation?
Editors comment:
We are amazed to see Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich continue to mishandle the affairs of government from the ivory tower of his North Side home. He clearly is dug in and not listening to anyone. Having blown off his first patron in a scandal over a garbage dump two years ago, the Gov's last patron, Emil Jones, is now out of the Illinois senate and can't directly support or protect him.
We are similarly fascinated to see his defense lawyer effectively drop the case in the Illinois Senate and potentially leave the Governor both unrepresented and not even present to hear the charges and evidence against him. He has already indicated he is taking the protection of the Fifth Amendment and will not testify.
This may be the shortest trial to oust a Governor in U.S. historyall the state senators have to do is to read and present the evidence from the bill of Impeachment and vote. As things currently sit if the Gov isn't going to fight other than his occasional ramblings to the media, why the heck not simply resign?
We want all of our readers to know the Governor heralded in the low era of workers' compensation as it relates to government in Illinois. We hope soon-to-be citizen Blagojevich's doings can be undone.
We remain chagrined to see Senator-by-Humiliation Roland Burris take office last week, after having mortified himself to beg the recently-arrested Blagojevich for the appointment and then embarrassed the U.S. Senate into approving him after the Democrat leaders all initially vowed not to accept anyone appointed by the disgraced Governor. We salute Secretary of State Jesse White for sticking to his guns and staying above all of it.
What most of our readers don't know or remember is from memory lane. If you look it up, in 2002, then-gubernatorial hopeful Milorad Blagojevich was in a three-way primary against now-Senator Roland Burris and former Chicago Schools superintendent Paul Vallas. What put Blagojevich over the top was financial and related primary support from the big plaintiff firms in southern Illinois-the men and women who brought you fun things like the World's Largest Asbestos docket or about 5,000 pending asbestos filings in a tiny rural county of 260,000 folks.
The zillionaire lawyers in that area aren't shy about making as much money as they can off their political contributions. As we reported, a judge from Madison County awarded a plaintiff legal fee of $1.17 billion dollars or what we were certain was over $100,000 per hour as part of the verdict against the tobacco companies; later wiped out by the Illinois Supreme Court.
From that shining example, understand the plaintiff bar in that area isn't bashful about wanting a return-on-investment with hand-picked hearing officers. Some of those lawyers have claims before the Illinois Workers' Compensation Commission (IWCC).
Similarly, in dealing with Mr. Pay-to-Play, the big-money southern Illinois plaintiff firms got almost-complete control of the IWCC. They immediately picked a plaintiff lawyer to be the chairman they wanted, switched funding of the commission out of general tax revenues onto a new fee levied exclusively on Illinois business, more than doubled the budget, changed the name of the joint and starting adding arbitrators who would tow the new line of their political patrons.
Most of the new arbitrators were former plaintiff lawyers; some of them would seemingly rule only for one side of the bar what we started to call 99.44% Petitioner-pure. We are happy to report many of them are now into the high 80s but the place still remains wildly imbalanced toward Illinois labor.
What then started to happen were all sorts of hi-jinks. First, we saw one of Illinois largest defense firms strangely get a commission post from the pro-labor Democrat Governor. Then almost as fast as she got the appointment, rumors and investigations of pay-to-play began and she quietly resigned from the position. It is fascinating to see this puzzle wrapped in a conundrum surrounded by an enigma has never again been investigated or mentioned by either the U.S. Attorney or the media.
We also later saw another commission appointment and her political patron hit the Rezko list, which was an Excel spreadsheet faxed to the Governor with a listing of who got what jobs and who their political sponsors were. Trust us; the only thing that surprised anyone is they were stupid enough to write it all down; this again emphasized the commission remained highly politicized.
Finally, we saw the silly PR battle of the 2004 and later 2005 Amendments to the Workers' Compensation Act in which Illinois already sky-high rates and benefits were again raised and new benefits instituted.
As part of the strange bargain, Illinois business got:
- A clunky and partial medical fee schedule,
- Non-mandatory utilization review the IWCC sometimes considers and most times ignores and
- A workers' comp fraud provision that has no real teeth in the face of wide-spread prosecutorial indifference.
1. While we assure you the vast majority of current arbitrators are intelligent, honest and professional hearing officers, our readers remain infuriated to see so many former claimant attorneys acting as arbitrators in this state. We still feel the commission remains completely out of kilter on a simple issue of locating and appointing actual civil servants in these positions by employing a secret political selection and retention system.
We feel such systems lead directly to the pay-to-play mentality that is the current sewer of Illinois politics. While police and fire testing for open positions is posted on the web in this state, you and I and the man-in-the-moon cant find the results of civil service testing for the arbitration posts. We assure you the best candidates get selected only if they have the political pull to get the appointments that is not what civil service is supposed to be.
Some of our top hearing officers also continue to work under the continued threat of immediate removal from office if they simply do their jobs but issue rulings or conduct their calls/hearings in a fashion not considered favorable to the politically connected attorneys across the state. We are told the former chairman would routinely call arbitrators at home to threaten them with immediate removal if they conducted too many pre-trial hearings, rather than try claims.
Again, that is not how civil service is supposed to work. If the jobs are going to be political, make them openly political appointments. If not, they should be available to the best possible candidates who match the requisite qualifications. And when we great solid hearing officers their jobs should come with civil service protections and not be subject to the whim of the administration of the moment. We hope the continued politicization of these posts gets media attention and is reformed.
2. Many Illinois government entities, including some departments of the State of Illinois, refuse to provide light work or institute mandatory light duty return-to-work programs. Outside Illinois , lots of states, counties and municipalities have their modified duty programs on the web you will not find such programs listed for the State of Illinois, County of Cook, or City of Chicago . It is not a coincidence such government entities are now taxing Illinoisans at record rates. The lack of modified work programs leaves hundreds of state and local government workers' off all work and collecting Illinois generous and tax-free TTD rates paid for by you and me, when they could otherwise be working. If you don't know and understand how critical modified duty and return-to-work programs are to cutting WC costs, please send a reply. We feel we need leadership in the various government entities who will actually start to understand running good government and avoiding truly unnecessary waste means running aggressive workers' compensation programs.
3. We are also told and infuriated to hear there are state, county and municipal risk managers who quietly turn over lists of non-litigated but accepted work injury claims for their employees with addresses of potential claimants to plaintiff law firms. The law firms then send letters to the injured workers' to seek to initiate attorney-client relationships and file applications. To our knowledge, if no money or other favors are changing hands, there is nothing specifically illegal about such practices but the ethics of it are deplorable. We truly feel there should be a law passed to make such referrals illegalit is completely contradictory to every concept of good government and sound business practices for this to occur.
We will never forget the joke from the comedians at Saturday Night Live where they told our Governor, if you are too corrupt for Illinois politics, you are too corrupt. We want all parts of Illinois government, particularly the Workers' Compensation commission, to learn the lesson from the past administration and start to move to being a place where honesty, fairness and an aversion to fraud are the name of the game. Please do not hesitate to reply with your thoughts and comments.
Eugene F. Keefe is a partner in the Chicago law firm of Keefe, Campbell & Associates.
The views and opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily those of workcompcentral.com, its editors or management.
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