Kern's workers' comp system
By The Bakersfield Californian
The workers' compensation system in Kern County is broken. The system that services county employees who have been injured while in their employment are not being serviced in a healthy and proper manner.
Employees are not allowed to obtain quality medical treatment without intervention and direct control of County Counsel -- the attorneys who represent and defend the county from liability.
The county is self-insured to provide employees with workers' compensation benefits while using county adjusters and medical occupational treatment centers to provide services from start to finish during an employee's claim. Doctors provide the services that the county dictates to the medical practitioners for the medical treatment of employees.
The contracted doctors allow deviation from their Hippocratic Oath in their treatment of patients for fear of losing the contracts for providing medical treatment to county employees.
I believe it is time that the county revisit contracting workers' compensation management to an outside agency or insurance company, which disconnects the ability to manage an employee's medical treatment from start to finish while also allowing additional intervention by county managers who also have to manage injured employees.
Nobody has ever benefitted from a dictatorship or monopoly.
Steven Wright
Bakersfield
Facebook
Twitter
Mobile
RSS
Most CommentedMost Popular
A forceful Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood announced at a tense press conference Thursday that David Sal Silva, whose death earlier this month raised questions about use of force by deputies, died as a result of hypertensive heart disease and was not only intoxicated but had methamphetamine...
The death of a man in custody following a prolonged struggle with Kern County Sheriff's deputies and CHP officers and the subsequent fracas over confiscated witness cellphones have gained international attention and raised concerns here that the incidents could tarnish the county's emerging...
The Kern County Sheriff's Office is out of control. That's one conclusion many people will draw based on the events of the past two weeks and in the context of recent years.
Sheriff’s investigators served a search warrant on Kern Medical Center and the Mary K. Shell Mental Health Center seeking medical records to find possible reasons for David Sal Silva’s behavior prior to and during his encounter with law enforcement, The Californian learned Friday.
Blood stains are still visible on the sidewalk at the corner of Flower Street and Palm Drive, where a Bakersfield man struggled with as many as nine officers and later died this week.
Classes were canceled at Bakersfield High School Monday after three small bottle bomb explosions struck campus, authorities said.
David Sal Silva’s screams seem like they will never stop.
Ridgeview High School star quarterback Kamari Cotton-Moya, 18, was shot in the arm just after midnight Sunday morning when gunfire broke out at a large party in east Bakersfield.