Recent Appellate Decisions Regarding Workers' Compensation
| Publication year | 1995 |
| Pages | 1585 |
| Citation | Vol. 24 No. 7 Pg. 1585 |
1995, July, Pg. 1585. Recent Appellate Decisions Regarding Workers' Compensation
This article discusses some of the recent Colorado appellate decisions on workers' compensation matters.
In Duran v. Industrial Claim Appeals Office,(fn1) the Colorado Supreme Court upheld the mandatory and exclusive use of schedules for paying permanent impairment benefits to workers who had injured an extremity or suffered a loss of hearing or vision. Duran asserted an Equal Protection challenge because under the schedule, he received substantially lower benefits than he would have received had his extremity impairment rating been converted to a whole person rating, which is the measure for impairments that do not involve an extremity, hearing or vision.
Some of the harsh effects of the mandatory use of schedules were alleviated by the statutory construction announced by the Court of Appeals in Mountain City Meat Company v. Industrial Claim Appeals Office.(fn2) In this case, the claimant had sustained a permanent medical impairment to his neck and shoulder as a result of the same industrial accident. The court held that when the same injury causes both scheduled and non-scheduled impairments, all effects of that injury must be compensated pursuant to a whole person rating.
The court acknowledged that the statutory provisions on medical impairment benefits were ambiguous and could be construed either to provide a split rating---that is, with the extremity rating confined to the schedule and the nonex-tremity rating paid as a whole person impairment---or to take the extremity rating off the schedule and pay both impairments on a whole person basis. It concluded that split ratings made no sense and were contrary to the stated purpose of the Workers' Compensation Act, which was to assure the quick and efficient delivery of benefits to injured workers with a minimum amount of litigation.
CRS § 8-42-111(5) (1994 Supp.) requires that permanent total disability benefits terminate when the injured worker reaches age sixty-five. However, other provisions of the Workers' Compensation Act require temporary total, temporary partial and permanent partial disability benefits to be paid without regard to the worker's age. In Romero v. The Industrial Claim Appeals Office,(fn3) the Court of Appeals sustained an Equal Protection challenge to this distinction and held that there was no rational basis for the legislature to terminate permanent total disability benefits at age sixty-five while continuing other benefits beyond that age.
The Romero court assumed for the sake of argument that the purpose of this distinction was to prevent any duplication between disability benefits and retirement benefits, because that was the statutory purpose advanced by the respondents and tacitly accepted by the Attorney General's office. The court held:
The court also noted that under Duran, cost reduction was a legitimate state purpose. However, it held that "[s]uch a purpose... cannot be achieved by arbitrarily denying benefits to one class of workers that are provided to others." The court noted that the alleged cost reduction program was irrational because
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