The Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board has issued yet another en banc Messele case, this time deciding that its prior decisions will only apply prospectively, and not retrospectively.  You can read the full opinion here.

In other words, if you were used and abused by the Medical Unit in the past, stuck with an improperly issued panel, you have no recourse but to try to reason out some valuable life lesson to be gained from the experience.  But in the future, at least in theory, the Medical Unit will be required to abide by the strict timeline outlined by the WCAB.

Aside from my cynic compulsion to doubt the happy endings promised at the start of every endeavor, I honestly don’t see much changing in how the Medical Unit does its work.  In six months, the medical unit will again start issuing panels without reviewing applications and say that they simply have too high a volume to review and reject wrongly filed requests.

Then, defendants and applicants will each get a panel and the defendant will have to file a Declaration of Readiness to Proceed to Hearing in order to get the applicant’s attorney’s improperly made request for a panel out.

In other words, learn the new dance, same as the old dance.