Pain. We all experience it, but what is pain? Certainly pain has a nociceptive component, meaning when we experience injury our nerves send a message to our brain that results in the state of awareness that may be best characterized by the word “ouch.” This is the type of pain that seems best controlled with traditional analgesics such as prescription opioids. Pain may also be neuropathic, meaning it is not the resulted of an injured tissue sending a classic pain signal to the brain but rather is the result of a damaged nerve that is sending abnormal signals to the brain due to the injured state of the nerve itself. This is why persons with neuropathic pain experience paresthesia and hyperesthesia rather than the typical stabbing or aching pain that would associated with physical injury to a muscle, bone, or joint. Chronic pain also differs from neuropathic and nociceptive pain in that it appears to be a learned cognitive response to a patho-anatomic abnormality that may or may not be causing actual nociceptive pain. Further complicating the range of pain that we experience is psychological pain; that is the somatization of psychological distress.
A new Psychological Science study (subscription required) throws a new wrench into the pain picture: persons in financial distress who are also in pain feel higher levels of pain than those are not experiencing economic distress. According to the study,
Interestingly, the authors concluded that “the psychological experience of lacking control helped generate the causal link from economic insecurity to physical pain.” This offers some hope that addressing the feeling of lacking control could help to lower the perceived experience of pain.
In the claims context, the experience of pain is a major cost-driver. Persons who experience pain will continue to seek treatment for injuries that have otherwise resolved or stabilized. In addition, persons who experience pain often miss time from work and have other disability-related costs. What complicates the apparent relationship of economic insecurity and pain in the claims context is that persons with claims often experience economic insecurity related to the claimed injuries. For example, an employee suffers a work-related knee injury and has to miss time from work. Even a conceded claim can cause financial distress as compensation benefits are paid out at 2/3 of average weekly wage and the injury may force the employee to miss overtime they expected to work. Matters get worse when a claimant is cut off from benefits but claims ongoing injury and an inability to return to work. In many such cases, claimants lack the savings or other sources of income replacement to weather the economic storm.
The problem from a claims perspective is that the economic situation of the claimant is outside the purview of the claim. For example, if a claimant alleges a work-related low back injury and the insurer questions whether the condition is in fact related to the employment, the insurer will have the claimant undergo an independent medical examination. If the independent medical expert concludes that the claimant’s condition is not related to her employment, the insurer will stop paying benefits to the claimant. At the same time, if the claimant is under work restrictions from her treating physician, she will not be able to return to work. As a result, she will lose her temporary total disability benefits while simultaneously having no recourse to income from her employment. If the Psychological Science study tells us anything, it is that losing temporary total disability benefits without other sources of income or income replacement will likely make the claimant’s physical condition worse. This can be a particularly fraught situation if the claimant is suffering from a degenerative condition that would wax and wane in severity even without economic distress. The study suggests that such a condition could be appreciated as being significantly worse in a claimant who is in economic distress. From a cost perspective, this is a problem because it will almost certainly lead the treating physician to conclude that conservative therapy failed to treat the condition. Concluding that conservative therapy failed often leads to a referral to a surgeon or the recommendation of surgery. All of a sudden, a condition that should be manageable with periodic noninvasive treatment and over-the-counter analgesics, becomes an intractable problem for which surgery is seen as the only option. And surgery is expensive.
If a claim reaches this point, it may be fairly stated that the reason conservative therapy failed and that surgery is being proposes is not due to the condition itself, but rather to the claimant’s financial distress which renders a normally tolerable condition into an intolerable one. The claimant’s financial distress is obviously related to the claim, but is not something over which the claims professional has control. The claims professional is not obliged to follow the recommendations of the IME doctor, but it would be highly unusual for a claims professional to continue to award benefits when she does not have to. The claims professional is not responsible for the claimant beyond the four corners of the claim. Except the decisions of the claims professional within the claim can have, as the study shows, consequences outside the four corners of the claim that can seep back into the claim. As such, it seems prudent for claims handlers to be aware, even if they have little control or choice, that the decision to deny benefits to a claimant can have the perverse effect of making the claim worse (from a cost perspective) than it would otherwise have been. At least then it will not be a surprise when the person with ordinary degenerative disc disease ends up with a fusion, failed back syndrome, and a claim for permanent total disability benefits.
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