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Check out the Rocky Mountain High Edition of Cavalcade of Risk. Louise of Colorado Health Insurance Insider produces a great compendium of recent "best of the web" risk posts on a variety of topics ranging from the ubiquitous health care debates to investing and long term insurance. It's a great way to get a sampling of several blogs. Plus, Louise...

David Warren died last week in a suburb of Melbourne, Australia. He was 85. You may never have heard of this aeronautical researcher, but his work has impacted anyone who travels by air. David Warren is credited with the invention of the black box. (A splendid obituary by Douglas Martin in the New York Times can be found here.) In...

Like much of the country, we've had a sizzling summer here in the northeast, and we are just entering the dog days of summer. In Ancient Rome, the Dog Days extended from July 24 through August 24 and were popularly believed to be an evil time "when the seas boiled, wine turned sour, dogs grew mad, and all creatures...

The following guest post was submitted by Gary Anderberg, Phd, the Practice Leader For Outcomes and Analytics at Broadspire. I was participating in a recent meeting of health, wellness, workers' compensation and disability professionals. One of the issues on the table was information that the regs defining "Cadillac" plans may loop the cost of wellness programs, disease management and other...

Jaan Sidorov dishes up a summer smorgasbord of risk at the 109th Cavalcade of Risk Picnic edition over at Disease Care Management Blog. Speaking of risk, yesterday Business Insurance twittered: Among the accomplishments of the legendary George Steinbrenner: making George Constanza learn about risk management. Risk management isn't a topic that surfaces in TV sitcoms too often, so we thank...

From Michigan, we learn the tragic news of the silo-related deaths of two teens on a farm. Victor Perez, 18, was a recent high school graduate who had worked on the farm for about 4 years. His co-worker Francisco Mendez Martinez, 17, had been on the job for about a month. News reports are thin and shrouded in mystery. One...

Today we examine one of the great conundrums in workers comp claims: the old injury that may or may not be defined as a new injury. In 2006 David Poulton worked for Martec Industries in Rochester, New York, as a laborer. Poulton had a bad back, having already filed workers comp claims in 1998 and 2000. When he visited his...

Happy post holiday weekend. This is a big vacation week, but if you are one of the many who is on the job today, here's a serving of a few news items that caught our attention. Complex Care - here at Lynch Ryan, we focus on helping injured workers to recover and get back to normal life activities, including work,...

Joe Cassano is not apologizing to anyone. The former AIG executive who helped bring the world economy tumbling down says he did nothing wrong. His underwriting standards never changed: he never saw any risk in underwriting those collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). And if AIG leadership had had the cojones to keep him on board after the proverbial waste matter hit...

A fresh new Cavalcade of Risk is awaiting your perusal at Wenchy's place - check it out!...

Five years ago almost to the day we blogged the saga of Dr. Jayant Patel, a surgeon of staggering incompetence who wreaked havoc on the citizens of Bundaberg, Australia. After 14 weeks of testimony, more than 75 witnesses and nearly 50 hours of deliberations over six days, a jury convicted Patel of manslaughter in the deaths of four patients and...

Lawyers, investigators, policymakers and safety professionals will be wrangling over the Deepwater Horizon tragedy for years to determine what happened, where fault lay, and who will pay. By many accounts, Deepwater Horizon was had a relatively good safety record. Its 125-member crew had no serious injuries in the seven years prior to the explosion. In a cruel irony, BP mangers...

Brad Wright of Wright on Health has an excellent edition of Health Wonk Review, which shines a spotlight on research. Brad notes that, going forward, research will be incredibly important as health reform is implemented and evaluated. He offers a fine research roundup from leading healthcare bloggers - check it out! Healthcare - According to a Commonwealth Fund report on...

We return to the beautiful state of Maine, where moose wander the woods looking for whatever interests a moose and where employers self-insured for workers comp look for a fee schedule. The moose are a lot happier than the self-insureds. As we have pointed out in prior blogs, the legislature mandated the creation of a fee schedule for medical services...

A sewer may not be the preferred place to begin the work week, but the working world calls and we must follow. About a year ago, we blogged the sad story of Shlomo and Harel Dahan, respectively the owner and heir of S. Dahan Piping and Heating company in Queens, New York. They were hired to vacuum an 18-foot-deep dry...

The saga of the New York self insurance trusts continues. We reported in April that justice had been served by Judge Kimberly O'Connell, who ruled that requiring solvent trusts to pay for the sins of insolvent trusts was unconstitutional. Now, according to Work Comp Central (subscription required), O'Connell herself has been overruled by a four judge panel, which has reinstated...

Two years ago, New York Governor Patterson convened a task force to examine the status of self-insured trusts for workers comp. He was forced to take action when a number of trusts failed, most notably those administered by Compensation Risk Managers (CRM). The insolvent trusts left behind a deficit of $500 million. (See our prior blogs here and here.) The...

Workers comp is 100 years old this year and by way of Roberto Ceniceros' informative blog Comp Time, we learn that there is a Workers' Compensation Centennial Commission (WCCC), which was formed to celebrate the anniversary of the first constitutional workers' compensation law in the United States. The WCCC was organized by a bi-partisan coalition of Wisconsin-based labor and...

For a biweekly risk roundup, check out this week's edition of Cavalcade of Risk over at My Wealth Builder....

There are five towns in Massachusetts that do not carry workers comp insurance for their employees. Four of them - Dana, Prescott, Enfield and Greenwich - are under 412 billion gallons of water: they were submerged during the 1930s in the making of the Quabbin Reservoir, which supplies drinking water to Boston and a number of suburban cities and towns....