The repeal of the Affordable Care Act (President Barack Obama’s health care law) is a real possibility in the Trump administration. It will be difficult to know how a repeal would affect workers’ compensation without having an idea about what alternative plan, if any, would replace the Affordable Care Act. But it seems certain that if Americans lose health insurance, they will have less control over their own medical care if they are hurt at work.
In 2011, Vermont passed a single-payer health care plan. In a blog post I wrote for Jon Gelman’s blog, I observed that if all employees had their own doctors, it would be next to impossible for employers to route injured workers to occupational-medicine clinics. A blogger for Lynch Ryan made a similar observation. Doctor choice is critical, because some employers go so far as to unlawfully conspire with claims adjusters and doctors to undermine the value of an employee’s workers’ compensation claim. A single-payer system decouples health insurance from employment, which makes employers less influential in the system
The ACA is not a single-payer system, but millions of Americans gained health insurance through public Medicaid programs in states that chose to expand Medicaid after the Supreme Court struck down the mandated Medicaid expansion in 2012. This coverage was decoupled from employment. Insurance obtained through an exchange is also not tied to individual employers either. People who lacked health insurance tended to not have doctors, which meant that they had no choice but to see whomever their employer wanted them to for a work injury.
The workers most vulnerable to injury are often the workers least likely to have health insurance. Younger people are more likely not to have health insurance. As Milwaukee lawyer Charlie Domer pointed out in a blog post last fall, younger workers are more likely to get hurt on the job. New employees are often unable to enroll in company health insurance plans right away. Last fall, I wrote a post about how employees within the first few months of their employment are more likely to get hurt on the job.
A silver lining to the gray cloud of a prospective ACA repeal is that even if an employee loses health insurance, Nebraska workers’ compensation court Rules 49 and 50 still allow an injured worker to choose a doctor who treated them before – presumably when that worker had health insurance. Unfortunately, Nebraska did not expand Medicaid, so there would be a smaller proportion of Nebraskans of who gained health insurance under the ACA than in states, like Iowa, where Medicaid was expanded.