Workers' Compensation

What Is Workers' Compensation?

The first lesson will go over the basic concepts in workers' compensation. You'll learn how your chances of being involved in a workers' compensation case—either as employee, employer, paralegal, or human resource coordinator—are much higher than you might expect. Every year, hundreds of thousands of claims are filed. In this lesson, you'll review how the system works, how claims are filed, and why it's so vital for you to know and understand the basic workers' compensation system.

Workers' Compensation Benefits

Would you like to know exactly what benefits an injured worker is entitled to receive? Are you unsure what terms like temporary total disability, permanent total disability, temporary partial, and many of the other terms used to describe workers' compensation benefits really mean? This lesson will take the mystery out of them all. It will go through each type of benefit, avoiding the legal jargon to provide a down-to-earth explanation of the benefit system in the workers' compensation system.

Federal Workers' Compensation

In this lesson, you'll examine the workers' compensation system that covers all federal employees. This is a huge and multilayered bureaucracy, but the lesson will go through it step by step to show you how the federal system, which covers hundreds of thousands of federal workers, is both similar to and different from the state systems. You'll also examine some of the new initiatives created to track workers' compensation fraud and to prevent government agencies from making double or triple payments for the same injuries.

Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid

How do Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid interact with workers' compensation benefits? This lesson will answer that question. It will begin with an overview of these three systems and then talk about how these agencies work with state and federal workers' compensation agencies to provide different levels of payments and benefits. If you've ever been injured on the job, are close to retirement, are pregnant, or are in any way disabled, then you need to know how all of these systems work together, as well as what types of benefits you can receive from each.

Employers' and Employees' Roles

So far, the lessons have focused on the workers' compensation system, from benefits to the relationships between other government agencies. This lesson will get specific about who is covered under workers' compensation statutes. What, for instance, qualifies a person as an "employee?" Are business owners covered by workers' compensation? How many employees must you have before you're legally obligated to make payments to the state workers' compensation fund? This lesson will answer those questions and many others.

What Qualifies as an Injury?

What types of injuries are covered under workers' compensation? People assume that if you slip and hurt yourself on the job, your injury will be covered. But is it? What about other types of injuries, such as repetitive stress injuries or psychological trauma? Are they covered as well? In this lesson, you'll learn how injuries are classified under workers' compensation systems and the rules that employees must follow in determining which injuries are covered and which are not.

Medical Benefits

It's time to get specific about medical benefits provided under workers' compensation. How much is the injured employee obligated to pay out of pocket? How many treatments may the employee receive? What about physical therapy or chiropractic care? This lesson will address those questions and show you some less traditional remedies. Just what types of treatment will the workers' compensation system pay for and what types will they force the employee to pay for?

Disability Benefits

This lesson will talk about the amount of money an injured employee will receive for different types of injuries. You'll learn the precise details about the dollar amounts an injured employee can expect to receive, and the lesson will break it down by the classification of benefits as temporary or total temporary disability. It will also go over how injuries are reclassified as permanent and what that means for the benefits paid out. Finally, you'll explore how benefits are actually paid and the possibilities of lump-sum payments.

Hearings

This lesson will focus on what happens when an injured employee comes into conflict with their employer about benefits. Suppose that the employer wants to terminate benefits; what recourse does the employee have? The employee can request a hearing for a judicial decision about benefits. You'll examine how these hearings are scheduled, what evi