Don’t Punish Our Heroes for Protecting California: the Legislature Needs to Save an Obscure but Important Insurance from Governor Newsom
Friday, June 5, 2026 | 73 | 0
By: Michael Beyda (Retired LAPD Police Officer)
Four years ago, I was gearing up to head into work as a Police Officer for the City of Los Angeles. Between trips to my car, I heard noises in my garage. I face danger each and every day on the job. I just wasn’t expecting to be met not by a raccoon, but by a burglar who had stolen a ballistic vest and one of my guns from my car. I was able to get away, but not before he shot me twice in the chest and once in the leg. The LA Times covered my harrowing experience: I thought I was going to die.
Even after extensive medical treatment and years of physical therapy, I was unable to return to work as a police officer. The gunshot wounds exacerbated my previous disabilities and I experience debilitating pain several times a week. I was only 39 years old when I was shot. Since then, I have had continuous surgeries, including one last year to remove shrapnel that had migrated to my bladder.
By some small stroke of luck, California law entitled me to workers’ compensation. Despite being off-duty, I was a police officer intervening in the commission of a crime, which made my injuries on-the-job. I spent months meeting with a lawyer, working on my case, and going through the proper adjudication proceedings. But even after all this effort and proving I was totally unable to work, my case was settled as two separate claims.
The City of Los Angeles argued my new gunshot wounds and previous disability were each partially responsible for my total inability to work, yet neither compensated me fully for the combined, permanent disability I now live with.
I was distraught, but my attorney helped me file a claim for California’s Subsequent Injury Benefit Trust Fund (SIBTF). I learned that SIBTF was created to remedy cases exactly like mine, where old and new injuries combine to completely disable someone, preventing them from receiving fair compensation. The Fund is designed to cover the difference between my initial disability and the permanent and total disability I am truly entitled to.
My claim is currently pending, and has been so for a month. This is exacerbated by the fact that I’m one of an estimated 30,000 Californians languishing on a waitlist due to the state’s inability to process claims. In the meantime, I have been forced to move to North Carolina: the meager amount I received from my work comp settlements was not enough to survive in California.
To wait this long and then be denied would be crushing. But a proposed budget bill, currently being pushed through the Legislature, threatens to do exactly that, and to thousands more. This new legislation, disguised as a budget adjustment, would redefine “disability” in a way that punishes dedication and service. The bill would make me totally ineligible for the benefits I’m applying for through SIBTF. It brazenly requires a disability to “incapacitate in the workplace without control by medication or medical devices.”
Think about that for a moment. As a police officer, it was impossible for me to allow any previous disability to incapacitate me. Lives were literally at stake each and every day; my duty demanded I manage any condition with vigilance and control. This proposed change to SIBTF would punish me, and countless others like me: firefighters, law enforcement, union members building vital housing and veterans who consistently push past pain and manage their conditions to serve our state, by denying us the vital support we need, simply because we refused to be incapacitated on the job.
This isn’t merely a reform; it’s a betrayal. This budget bill isn’t designed to save money; it’s designed to erase a backlog of 30,000 claims and sweep the state’s bureaucratic failures under the rug. I suspect it will only shift the burden of care for permanently disabled workers onto other state welfare systems, creating no real savings. Even if I wanted to continue fighting my case, the bill’s language would purge me from the system entirely, forcing me to start over, a task I simply cannot undertake in my condition.
Workers’ compensation was invented to support people like me, and SIBTF has been an important part of California’s system for decades. This change would abandon not only me, but thousands of deserving Californians. It is a cynical maneuver that punishes service, ignores administrative negligence, and betrays those who have given their all for this state. Governor Newsom and our legislators must recognize the profound and unjust impact of this provision. They must remove this harmful language from the budget bill and stand with California’s disabled injured workers. This cannot be allowed to pass.