WCDefenseCA

Happy Monday, dear readers!

After spending almost my entire life in California, do you know who my favorite character in The Godfather is?  None other than Vito Corleone.  And why?  Aside from the obvious, whenever I hear his name, it makes me think of a veto from the Governor’s desk.  In California, a veto is usually a wonderful thing.

Such is the case with the Governor’s veto of SB 788.  Senate Bill 788 on its face claimed that it would “prohibit consideration of race, religious creed, color, national origin, gender, marital status, sex, sexual identity, or sexual orientation to determine the approximate percentage to the permanent disability caused by other factors.”   As those of us in the trenches know all too well, this would have been used as another litigation tactic to make carrying the defendant’s burden of proof as to apportionment more expensive.

If a doctor apportions permanent disability to any factor that the applicant attorney could somehow frame in a light as considering the factors prohibited by SB788, there’s another triable issue which means more money.

For example, if a particular applicant is an immigrant from a third-world country and suffered malnutrition as a child in his country of origin, isn’t apportioning to that malnutrition a consideration of “national origin”?  Or how about apportioning some permanent disability to a pregnancy?  Governor Brown vetoed AB 570 which would have prohibited just that, but can’t apportionment to pregnancy be framed in the context of considering “gender”? 

Or what about psyche claims?  If the psychiatric med-legal apportionments some percentage of an applicant’s depression to a divorce, isn’t that considering “marital status”?

Apportionment is already hard enough to secure in California’s workers’ comp  system without the likes of SB 788 picking the back pocket of employers while the rest of the system robs the rest.