Dark Day in Florida History

Added: (Mon Oct 26 2009)

Pressbox (Press Release) - Governor Charlie Crist should have advocated for the rights of working men and women all over Florida.But according to Orlando-based attorney Tony Francis of the Francis Law Firm, on May 29, 2009, when he signed into law the infamous HB 903, he did just the opposite.

HB 903 does a disservice to Floridians by its very existence. Each year, an estimated 70,000 Floridians suffer a debilitating work-related injury on the job. But when HB 903 was signed into law by the Republican Governor on May 29, 2009, any person capable of working lost a sense of justice that they formerly had. “I consider the passage of our current Workers Compensation Law a kind of preventable tragedy,” said Orlando-based attorney Tony Francis.

HB 903 is shaped not by workers, but by business and insurance interests intent on exercising control over the provision of medical care and wage-loss benefits to injured workers. “As it stands now, Florida law gives the employer and their insurance carrier the right to choose the doctors without any input from the injured worker,” Francis explains. Behind closed doors, insurance adjusters and their attorneys may hold discussions with physicians encouraging them to forego potentially important medical testing, refrain from prescribing adequate treatment, or placing injured workers temporarily out of work – simply because these options may prove expensive to the insurance company. Injured workers now “protected” under the auspices of HB 903 may be denied benefits without even the pretense of an explanation.

Florida’s former statute, now obsolete as of July, allows an injured worker who has been wrongfully denied benefits to hire an attorney to help them obtain benefits. If successful, the insurance company was obliged to pay a “reasonable” fee to the attorney who represented the injured worker. “The word ‘reasonable’ in the law allowed the presiding judge to award a fee that took into consideration such factors as the time and effort expended by the lawyer to handle the case, including the difficulty of the case,” says Francis. But under the current HB 903, it’s a new and crueler ballgame. “When the word ‘reasonable’ is removed, and an inadequate fee schedule is substituted, many attorneys become reluctant to take on a case – leaving the injured worker at the mercy of an unscrupulous insurance company,” Francis concludes.