About three years ago, California's workers' compensation system was "reformed." Here are two results, from my personal knowledge:

"Abby" fell off a utility pole ten or so years ago and shattered her left wrist. It's now held together with a steel rod. Although she could no longer bend the wrist, she was able to continue working as a telecomm technician. (She got no workers' comp for the original injury -- she was working for herself at the time.)

Last winter, the screws holding one end of the rod to the bones in the back of her hand started to work loose; the end of the rod began to lift up from the back of her hand, stretching the skin in an alarming way. She thought it might be due to a fall she'd taken while working (this time for a regular employer), and filed a claim for worker's compensation.

Enter the workers' compensation insurance company investigators. They had 90 days to investigate and approve or deny her claim. They interviewed Abby, her boss, her co-workers, and everyone else they could think of. They took depositions. They got doctors' opinions.

The case was pretty clear from the get-go: there was no documentation of the fall, though no one doubted it had happened; the fall might have caused the problem, or it might not have, or it might have contributed to it, with time and normal living contributing as well. In a rational society, the conclusion would have been to split the difference: have workers' comp pay half the cost of fixing Abby's wrist, let Abby come up with the rest.

Oh, but we can't do that -- workers' comp has been reformed. Instead, the company's investigators ran up as many billable hours as they could for as long as they could, during which time Abby couldn't work -- she needed to get her wrist fixed, and she couldn't get her wrist fixed unless worker's comp paid for at least part of it. On the very last day, the company denied Abby's claim.

Now we move on to a certain school district where instructional assistants -- uncredentialed employees -- must lift disabled students from their wheelchairs at least once a day. Some of these students weigh over 200 pounds, and some are too spastic or paralyzed to help with the lift. And the IAs are not really trained on proper lifting technique -- not that there is a proper one-person lifting technique for getting a 200-lb quadriplegic out of a wheelchair. So some of them get strained muscles (temporary impairment) or herniated disks (permanent impairment).

Workers' compensation covers that, of course. All you have to do is fill out a ten-page questionnaire and provide records of every single doctor, chiropractor, or physical therapist visit you've had in the last ten years. Every single one. And if you fail to do that, or if you omit one appointment, or say it was for psoriasis when the doctor's record says it was eczema, your claim can be held up or denied.

Workers' compensation fraud is supposed to have been a big problem. Premiums were supposedly driving employers out of California. But while I know no one who has ever filed a fraudulent workers' comp claim -- do you? -- I know at least two people who've been screwed over in the stupidest bureaucratic ways by the workers' comp insurance/investigators complex, while the investigators were making money hand over fist, quite obviously running out the clock and imposing endless complex paperwork demands on people who had been injured at work.

And who pays for the investigators' pointless running around? Employers, of course -- who must be wondering why, in these post-reform days, workers' compensation insurance policies still cost so damn much.