It is easy to form an opinion about something when someone hasn’t had a personal experience with the matter. Being injured on the job and then losing the ability to work and support one’s family is a significant loss. Having to fight for workers’ compensation claims is rarely something that an injured worker wants to do; it is something they have to do and have the right to do.
Employers are required to have insurance in case a worker is injured in a workplace accident and needs to collect workers’ compensation benefits as a result of the incident. But those benefits aren’t always easily collected when insurers find a reason to challenge whether an accident was, in fact, work related. A recent opinion piece made some hasty, harsh assumptions about Illinois’ workers’ comp system.
Recently, changes were supposed to have been put in place to the state system. Employers were supposed to be able to buy insurance at a reduced cost in order to more easily protect their workers. But, according to some critics of the supposed reform, businesses have not saved any money yet.
A editorial in The State Journal-Register may have jumped the gun by suggesting that the cost of workers’ compensation insurance isn’t high because of insurance companies but because of supposedly injured workers.
So, if someone gets injured while working, should he or she feel ashamed to seek the benefits that they believe they deserve? Work accidents do happen, and it is dangerous to make assumptions that portray potential victims as greedy liars. Questions regarding work injuries are not always easily answered, and despite what critics believe, workers don’t commonly get paid workers’ comp benefits that they aren’t entitled to.