CompScope™ Benchmarks, 10th Edition

CompScope™ benchmarks provide the most meaningful interstate comparisons currently available for more than 60 system performance measures for fifteen large states. The states in this 10th edition of CompScope™— California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin—represent over 50 percent of the nation’s workers’ compensation benefit payments.

This comprehensive reference book provides useful information on two central questions:

·         How does the performance of a state system compare with that of other states?

·         How is workers' compensation system performance changing over time?

This report can help policymakers and others benchmark state system performance or a company’s workers’ compensation program. The benchmarks also provide an excellent baseline for tracking the effectiveness of policy changes and identifying important trends.

Illustrative findings:
 

• Indemnity benefits per claim in Minnesota were lower than typical of the study states. This result was not because of lower statutory benefits, but because Minnesota workers returned to work faster and fewer cases received permanent partial disability benefits or lump-sum settlements. Indemnity benefits per claim with more than 7 days of lost time in Minnesota were 27 percent lower than in the median study state for 2005 claims at an average 36 months of experience. The lower indemnity benefits per claim were an important factor in Minnesota’s lower costs per all paid claims (30 percent lower) and in claims with more than 7 days of lost time (14 percent lower) when compared to the typical or median study state.
• In Louisiana, workers were off the job longer than in other wage-loss study states, the major factor in higher-than-typical indemnity benefits per claim. The total indemnity benefit per claim received by the average worker was higher than in other states, even though the workers’ weekly benefits were capped at lower levels in Louisiana than in other states. Medical costs and expenses per claim in Louisiana were also among the highest of the 15 study states. As a result, costs per all paid claims in Louisiana were 35 percent higher than the typical study state, on average.
• The provisions in the 2004 reforms in Tennessee that related to permanent partial disability (PPD) or lump-sum payments had a large and sustained impact. The average PPD/lump-sum payment per claim decreased 11 percent for claims with 36 months of experience. For claims with shorter maturities, the reforms resulted in stable growth rates of the average PPD/lump-sum payment per claim. Since 2005, the average PPD/lump-sum payment per claim grew in line with the changes in wages. Although the average PPD/lump-sum payment per PPD/lump-sum claim decreased for more mature claims, Tennessee ranked second highest among the other 10 non-wage-loss states in the study for claims with 36 months of experience.

The study used data from claims from injury years 2002 through 2007, evaluated as of March 31 of each year from 2003 through 2008, from WCRI’s Detailed Benchmarking/Evaluation database containing over 27 million claims. The report contains separate state reports for 13 of the 15 study states (California, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin).