Document 6bB8YYjyyLRnk8o6OExZByGe9

352 INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE AND OCCUPATIONAL MEDICINE Until the compensation scale has been adjusted to the level of maintenance, there should be a complete moratorium on general reductions in the insurance premium rates. During the last 15 years rate reductions have far outrun benefit increases. This is the reverse of the clearly indicated action, because the rate redundancy in the main was caused by premium collections on higher wages and larger aggregate payrolls, while compensation payments went through the bottleneck of the inelastic weekly maximum restriction on the amount payable. The fat on the premium rates should have gone into benefit adjustments. In Manitoba some insurance rates have remained the same for 30 years. Since one purpose of insurance is stability, the annual, turmoil, in the United States, over premium rate changes, ignoring the long range ups and downs of profit and loss, is a departure from insurance goals. One year there is the hue and cry that the insurance companies are getting rich robbing the employers; while the next year there may be alarm about their expected insolvency. This fear is attested by the provision for security funds against insol vency, found in some states. If the actuaries cannot solve this problem, why not try common sense, as in Manitoba? The weekly maximum payment is now $150 in Arizona and $121 for civil employees of the federal government, while in Alaska there is no weekly maximum limitation, whatever. Nevertheless, there are still many influential persons who tell legislatures that raising the weekly maximum from $20 to $35 or less would drive out industry and bankrupt insurance carriers. Compensation payments are sup posed to be based mainly on a percentage of the wages earned and on which insurance premiums are collected, but now to a large extent the weekly maximum limit nullifies the percentage of wage basis, so that many injured workers, instead of receiving two thirds of the wage, for instance, may receive one fourth. If there is any rational weekly maximum limit, it should be the ceiling at which the collection of premium on the wage stops. Formerly there was no such ceiling, but now it may be $100 a week. Suppose that the ceiling for the collection of insurance premiums is $100 a week, then the weekly compensation payment should be $66, if the per centage limitation is two thirds of the wages. We in North America are a great and generous people; may heaven save us from the fear that providing decently for injured workers will bankrupt the economy! Here, again, is a great blunder-- that of applying insurance principles to. collections and welfare principles to pay ments ! The indicated remedy is not philanthropy but consistency in applying insur ance principles. At present the weekly maximum figure is not the result of any insurance computation; it is, on the contrary, the guess of amateur psychiatrists who think they know the exact point at which the temptation to "malinger" will turn honest men into crooks. The objective data are a percentage figure' and a wage that has already been arrived at by collective bargaining or the current market. The inadequacies of the workmen's compensation laws might soon be cured if all groups that have, influence with the legislature would concentrate their fire on the main objectives, instead of dissipating their attention on the hundreds of bills-submitted every year to the legislatures. The / annual crop of amendments to the compensation laws points to the absence,, in many states, of competent and disinter ested guidance. Some compensation administrators have been reluctant to take the lead in guiding law changes, holding, that it is their duty to apply the law as it is