The Pennsylvania Supreme Court last week altered drastically the landscape for workers’ compensation carriers and created future uncertainties when it struck down portion of the Workers’ Compensation Act. The state’s highest court held in Protz v. WCAB (Derry Area School District) that the impairment rating evaluation (IRE) section of the act was an unconstitutional delegation to the American Medical Association (AMA).

The decision effectively ends the practice of limiting an injured worker’s wage loss payments through the IRE process. Since 1996, the Pennsylvania Workers’ Compensation Act has permitted insurance companies to request that an injured worker undergo an IRE once he or she has received 104 weeks of temporary total disability benefits. The Pennsylvania Bureau of Workers’ Compensation would then assign an IRE to a physical to determine the injured workers’ level of impairment according to the American Medical Association Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment. According to the Act, once the injured worker had reached maximum medical improvement and was determined to be less than 50% impaired by the work injury, the benefits would then be converted to a partial rate. That partial rate would then only be payable for 500 additional weeks. The IRE process effectively provided a cutoff after 604 weeks for many injured workers without the employer proving the injured worker’s full recovery or earning power.

The court in Protz held that the IRE section of the Workers’ Compensation Act was unconstitutional delegation to the AMA. Accordingly, in Pennsylvania, IREs now will have no legal consequences, and the Workers’ Compensation Bureau will not be able to assign injured workers to physicians to do IRE. Thus in order to limit future workers’ compensation benefits to injured workers, employers in Pennsylvania now must obtain a full recovery medical opinion, make work available, or modify the benefit using an adequate medical assessment. Absent of these steps, the injured workers are entitled to benefit payment for life.

The decision came down as a great victory for injured workers in Pennsylvania. Employers and Insurers consistently employed this IRE scheme to avoid further payments to injured workers, even when the workers were not fully recovered but the partial rate would not be enough to cover the medical costs and wage loss.

Currently, Georgia Workers’ Compensation Act also has a limit on the time that an injured worker can receive medical benefits. The provision has not been challenged on its constitutionality yet. However, case like Protz bring optimistic hope for the future of injured workers across the nation.