Last night just after midnight, the House of Representatives passed HB 1402, a measure opposed by the business community because it introduces more adversarial legal process into the state's workers' comp appeals system. It is designed to prevent effective communication between employer representatives and claimant medical providers by channeling those contacts through the claimant's attorney.
The bill passed 55-42, with a handful of Democrats crossing party lines to vote no. the Department of Labor & Industries, which in past years has opposed the legislation, stayed on the sidelines this year, having brokered with the bills' proponents an exemption from the bill's more onerous features.
The bill, if it passes the Senate and becomes law, is expected to add delay, and therefore cost and inefficiency, to the resolution of disputed workers' compensation claims. It undoes a 1992 decision of the Washington Supreme Court, Holbrook v. Weyerhaeuser, in which the court, surveying the prior 80 years of workers' compensation law, observed "[t]he Legislature has determined that a free flow of information is necessary for the efficient and proper resolution of industrial insurance claims." (Holbrook, 118 Wn.2d 306, 318).
Evidently, at the behest of the politically powerful claimants' bar, the Legislature, and to a certain extent the Department of Labor & Industries, is willing to revisit that determination.
