There is  real frustration about the fact that the New York State Insurance Fund’s  assessment charges are 10.1 vs. 20.2 for private carriers!

Surprise,

Included in the 2007 NY workers comp reform laws was a cap on the amount of PPD benefits for claimants after March 2007 and required private insurers to deposit lump-sum PPD benefits into the state Aggregate Trust Fund after July 2007.

However, employers argued in Randy Raynor vs. Landmark Chrysler et al. that the lump-sum provision should not apply to employees who were injured prior to March 2007 but received benefits after July 2007 because it would be “speculative” to calculate lump-sum, uncapped awards for those claimants.

In the attached article were NYS court of appeals affirmed a lower appellate court ruling,  the accident happened in 2004 a couple of years before the new reform yet the court ruled that even though the PPD was uncapped the insurance company  had to put $200,000 into trust-fund right away  versus the old system in which carriers typically made regularly-scheduled payments to injured workers.

It now looks like even on old (uncapped claims with accident dates prior to 2007 )  once the worker is being classified PPD, the private insurance carrier is obligated to deposit the present value sum of future indemnity payments into the Aggregate Trust Fund (ATF). In many cases, this will be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I would suggest getting Section 32 happy BUT claimants attorneys are very well aware of the above ruling so …