A new transparency measure for injured workers in South Dakota has been put on pause

A committee that oversees the state's worker compensation laws gave itself more time Thursday to consider a proposal requiring that injured workers receive certain communications from case managers to their medical providers.

At issue is an addition to state law that would require nurse case managers, who administer claims made by injured workers, to include those workers on communications to health providers regarding the compensability, causation or entitlement to workers' compensation benefits.

Nancy Turbak Berry, a Watertown lawyer who presented the proposal, argued that nurse case managers who are supposed to be neutral parties between insurance companies and injured workers are in practice often working on behalf of insurance companies. Sometimes, she said, nurse case managers share the same resources as insurer claim handlers.

Allowing case managers to communicate with an injured worker's health providers without including the worker allow insurers to manipulate an insurance claim to the benefit of insurance companies.

"I just don't think we want these types of secret communications going on behind the scenes," she told the members of the Workers' Compensation Advisory Council. The council's support for changes to state worker compensation laws is usually essential when those proposals go to the state Legislature.

But Pierre lawyer Doug Abraham, who represents the South Dakota Retailers Association and the American Property Casualty Insurance Association, said that requiring those communications would bog down the work comp system, delaying compensation to injured workers.

"This isn't a problem in South Dakota, and it will cause more problems than it solves," he said.

Abraham also argued the language was overly broad, and that it would require case managers to include workers on routine communications, like when asking for an appointment. He also said that those communications are already discoverable when cases go to trial.

Only a handful of worker compensation cases, he added, are adversarial.

Turbak Berry countered that Abraham was misinterpreting the language.

"We're not saying they can't ask that," he said. "We just want a CC on the bottom of the letter."

But members of the council, which includes nine voting members, expressed concern about how the proposal would interact with existing laws. Jason Dodson, a small business owner from Pierre who represents employers on the council, said he could see both sides of the argument. But he wanted to know more about what other states require.

"There's not enough for me to go on here," he said.

Council members said additional time to gather more information will allow them to make a decision on the topic before the next legislative session. The council will likely meet again in November. The next legislative session starts in January.

In other business Thursday, the committee voted down a proposal that would have extended the amount of time that workers have to report injuries. Currently, state law says they have three business days to report an injury for the purposes of submitting a claim.

But state Sen. Reynold Nesiba, D-Sioux Falls, who presented the proposal to extend that to 30 days, said the three-day limit was out of step with reporting requirements in other states, which are longer. South Dakota's requirement was 30 days until 1994, he added.

An alternative proposal that would have extended the reporting period to seven days also failed.

This article originally appeared on Sioux Falls Argus Leader: South Dakota committee pauses transparency measure for injured workers