2007 Data for National and North Carolina Workers' Compensation Released
On August 26, the National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI) released a comprehensive report on 2007 data regarding overall domestic and state-by-state (including North Carolina) workers’ compensation benefits. Per the NASI, benefit payments across the nation in 2007 equaled $55.4 billion – a 2% increase over the amount paid out in 2006. Cash payments declined by about 10% in California, offsetting the increases in medical and indemnity benefits. All told, roughly half of the total amount paid out – $27.2 billion – went to cover costs of medical bills. That represented an increase of over 3% from 2006. (Health insurance analysts have been digging into the numbers to determine whether they represent a trend or whether the bump might simply be statistical noise.) The rest of the money – $28.3 billion – went to replace wages lost. This amount increased by just 0.08% from 2006. It would thus be statistically unsound to read any meaningful trends into such data.
NASI reported that employers across the US spent a total of about $85 million on insurance for workers’ compensation and other related expenses. (Those figures include employers who self-insure.) So how trustworthy are these data? Since NASI is both non-partisan and non-for-profit, one can safely assume that there’s no political agenda driving the numbers. Of course, calculating precisely how North Carolina workers’ compensation insurance and other types of social insurance ultimately impact the economy can be a complicated business. After all, given the number of non-linear factors involved, it’s tricky to tease out precisely how changes to different variables impact the economy as a whole.
For instance, if the relationship between North Carolina workers’ compensation insurance premiums and North Carolina’s GDP were simple linear, it might be easy to recommend policy solutions. But since these relationships are clearly complex and non-linear, there’s no way to predict precisely how to manipulate, for instance, social insurance premium rates to get desired effects. For more information about the 2007 NASI figures, check out the full report at www.nasi.org.
PR Newswire, Drop in California’s Workers’ Compensation Spending Slows Growth in National Spending in 2007
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