The Florida Supreme Court issued two significant decisions in 2016. The Castellanos decision in April 2016 declared the mandatory worker attorney fee schedule in workers’ compensation unconstitutional as a violation of due process. The Westphal decision in June 2016 ruled that the state’s 104-week limitation on temporary total disability benefits is unconstitutional as a denial of right of access to the courts. Data in this study reflect up to 36 months of experience after these court decisions. Florida also implemented multiple medical fee schedule updates since 2015. Results in this study reflect up to 51 months of experience after the 2015 hospital fee schedule change, 39 months after the 2016 ambulatory surgery center fee schedule update, and 33 months and 21 months after the 2016 and 2017 professional fee schedule updates, respectively. 

The 20th edition of this study for Florida helps policymakers and other system stakeholders identify current cost drivers and emerging trends in a wide variety of workers’ compensation system performance measures. It also provides an excellent baseline for tracking the effectiveness of policy changes and monitoring important trends, such as the impact of COVID-19. The study provides meaningful comparisons between Florida and 17 other study states on total costs per claim, income benefits, overall medical payments, use of benefits, duration of temporary disability, frequency and payments of permanent partial disability/lump-sum claims, benefit delivery expenses, litigiousness, timeliness of payments, and other metrics. It also examines how these metrics have changed, primarily from 2013 to 2018, for claims at various maturities. Claims with experience through March 2019 for injuries up to and including 2018 were analyzed. In some cases, a longer time frame was used to supply historical context for key metrics.

CompScope™ Benchmarks for Florida, 20th Edition. Rui Yang. April 2020. WC-20-02.

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