Agenda - Council - 02/08/2021 - Laserfiche WebLink

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g) Opposes any mandatory, centralized, statewide health insurance option for active or retired city employees. h) Supports changing Minn. Stat. § 62A.21 to place reasonable limits on health care continuation for former spouses, similar to the Federal COBRA law. HR-13. Workers' Compensation Issue: Rising medical costs are an increasingly serious problem for all employers and insurers, and now represent over half of all loss costs within the workers' compensation system. Medical costs will be a major driver of future workers' compensation premium increases. In addition, the 2013 legislature added post - traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a compensable injury and in 2014, a Minnesota Supreme Court decision found that provisions in the Workers' Compensation statute which allow workers compensation benefits for permanent and total disabilities to be offset by disability benefits and pension benefits such as Social Security does not apply to retirement benefits of the Public Employees Retirement Association. In 2018, the Legislature modified Minn. Stat. § 176.011 subd. 15, which defines an occupational disease to add a rebuttable presumption to a diagnosis of PTSD in certain public safety and related personnel. In 2020, the legislature modified Minn. Stat. § 176.011, subd. 15 to temporarily add a diagnosis of COVID-19 for peace officers, firefighters, paramedics and other defined employee classes as a presumed occupational disease covered by the workers' compensation system. The Minnesota Legislature also regularly considered proposals to expand the heart, lung and infectious disease presumptions for public safety workers, and to make the presumptions more conclusive and difficult 114 to rebut. These types of benefit expansions would further increase municipal workers' compensation costs. Response: Legislative action is necessary to address increasing workers' compensation costs, particularly rising medical costs. The League of Minnesota Cities supports: a) Use of the Workers Compensation Advisory Council (WCAC) system to consider proposals for changes to the workers' compensation law, and urges the WCAC and the Legislature to approve medical cost containment reforms. b) Filling an existing WCAC employer vacancy with a public -sector employer representative or adding a designated public -sector employer representative to the WCAC. c) Continuing the WCRA as the mandatory workers' compensation reinsurer for insurers and self - insurers in Minnesota and supports modifying state statutes to treat PTSD events involving several affected parties as one occurrence for retention purposes, thereby reducing the exposure of self -insured entities and the statewide insurance pools. Such a change would not have any effect on the benefit an individual employee would receive. d) Legislation that would disallow the "stacking" of PERA retirement benefits and Workers Compensation benefits due to the fact that some injured employees could receive total compensation from workers' compensation and PERA retirement benefits that would be well above the salary that they had been earning and the fact that the costs would ultimately be passed on to cities and their taxpayers.