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Ed Vrdolyak Law Firm Workers Comp actions in question

Cynthia Davenport Illinois Injured Worker The Illinois Workers’ Compensation Program is under fire again as insiders game the system for their benefit. The City of Chicago, The Department of Water Management, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Alderman Burke, Illinois Lawyers have been fixing workers compensation cases for decades. One of the best tricks is the MMI maximum medical improvement doctors give to aid in the remove of employees and forcing settlements. The City of Chicago refuses to allow workers to return unless they receive a full Doctors release. The City of Chicago, under Alderman Burke’s direction, still allow major settlements for well-connected lawyers and employees that game the system year after year. Despite the major settlements, the City signs off on the loss of the person, quite opposite the full release. What? When you settle the Illinois Workers Compensation claim, you sign off the permanent loss. So, if you have a permanent loss, how can you return with no restrictions? The Illinois Lawyers have been working that angle for years and it is Insurance FRAUD. Alderman Burke takes hack Chicago law department lawyers off the cases and puts his private law firms to handle the cases for massive campaign contributions.

A major shuffle at the Chicago Committee on Finance will not save Crooked Burke. According to several Chicago Mayoral candidates, it will be an issue this next two years.

Please enjoy a lady I am going to write about and tell you about the criminal treatment she has received. Cynthia reported her poor treatment by Ed Vrdolyak and his workers’ compensation lawyer Mr. Casey. Mr. Casey seemed too busy to help Cynthia when she had a major stroke and was subject to abuses by the City of Chicago. When Mr. Casey was removed from her case, Mr. Casey went to the new Attorney to make sure he gets a cut “of the action”. This happened at the Illinois Workers Compensation Commission when the transition was made. Amazing what you see and “hear” in those hallways. Cases like these result in crippled workers getting less money and lawyers on both sides splitting the fees.

Alderman Burke has made a great life for him and his old lady, too bad he did so on the back of 65-year-old women, that just lost her husband, and got screwed out of her lawful benefits. Hey Alderman Burke, you keep the Chicago newspapers quiet about your lavish lifestyle, take a look at a lady whose life you have destroyed for greed.

Time to get my Irish Video hat on soon.

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The Defender speaks on Alderman Burke and the Committee on Finance

City Worker Denied Surgery to Relieve Pain

By Ken Hare

Chicago Defender Staff Writer

On January 7, 2013, city worker Reginald Williams Sr., who has worked with the Department of Transportation for over 20 years was injured on the job.

He was a passenger in an 18-wheel city truck when the driver miscalculated the height of a viaduct and ran into the overpass. The impact injured everyone riding in the cab and an ambulance was dispatched.

The next day, Williams was instructed to go to Mercy Works for Occupational Medicine and see the doctors that are part of the city’s workers’ compensation network.

Shortly after his accident, Williams applied for workmen’s compensation and was immediately awarded monthly benefits that started the same month of the accident, January 2013 and lasted until December 2014.

In a letter dated January 14, 2015, Monica Somerville, Director of the Workers’ Compensation Division, stated that Williams was to complete the paper work to be reinstated to “full duty” work in an “unrestricted capacity.” The letter was based on a Dr. Levin’s Independent Medical Examiner’s (IME) report that was written on December 3, 2014.

Dr. Levin, in addition to that report, also wrote a 53-page report addressed to a Patricia O’Connor chronicling Williams’ medical history throughout the life of his claim. The report is a compilation of all the visits that Williams made to the doctor’s office regarding his conditions while he received benefits, benefits that lasted for twenty-three months.

“I contacted my attorney and asked how could they terminate my benefits. He said it was based on the MRI report and the doctor’s opinion that I was able to go back to work full time,” Williams stated. “I told my attorney that someone was lying and he said we have to wait to see the report.”

Williams ended up firing his first attorney and hiring another after weeks went by with no progress on his case. Subsequently, he hired another attorney who also didn’t make any substantial progress and he too was fired after several months.

After obtaining a copy of the report, according to Williams, he came to the conclusion that Dr. Levin had incorrect information about his shoulder that wasn’t injured in the accident and somehow this information was used to justify terminating his case.

Attorney Mark Weissburg, who isn’t affiliated with the case, but specializes in Social Security and Workers’ Compensation is all too familiar with the decision to terminate clients.

“The City would have to explain its decision making process. Some employers fire injured workers as a way of scaring the remaining employees so they don’t report work injuries,” Weissburg said. “Other times an employer fails to follow the law and acts in ways that are contrary to the word and intent of the Workers’ Compensation Act.”

Throughout the 53 page report, it’s indisputably noted that Williams continues to experience severe back pain, and is commented on by several of the doctors that Dr. Levin uses in his final report.

“I continue to be in constant pain while taking Norco and Dr. Levin knows that I am,” Williams said. “I am sad that my request for surgery has been denied even though I did everything the city told my doctors to do. Just when I thought the city was about to approve my surgery, Dr. Levin said I didn’t need it. And my benefits were terminated.”

Attorney Weissburg said, “I’ve seen employers make decisions that not only hurt the injured worker, but are also not in the employer’s own best interests. When there are reasonable questions regarding the facts of a work injury, those should be investigated, but when it is clear that a worker was injured at work, the appropriate benefits should be paid in a timely manner.”

The question some ask is how the city of Chicago and one of its affiliated doctors says it is okay for a city employee, who is taking one of the most powerful pain killers known to man, to return to work in “full duty” in an “unrestricted capacity.”

The warning label for Norco states: “This medication may impair your thinking or reactions. Avoid driving or operating machinery until you know how Norco will affect you. Dizziness or severe drowsiness can cause falls or other accidents.”

The Chicago Defender attempted to contact Dr. Levin, Monica Somerville from Workers’ Compensation and Mr. Williams’ attorney, George Argionis, all declined to comment on this story.

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Sun-Times Editorial: Pull back curtain on Ald. Burke’s workers comp fiefdom

Sun 2/28/2016 6:58 PM

WRITTEN BY SUN-TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD POSTED: 02/28/2016, 02:07PM

For more than a century in Chicago, a mere City Council committee — now tightly controlled by a single powerful alderman — has called the shots on all worker compensation claims, in recent years shelling out what experts say is a “staggering” amount of money.

Feel free to scream about that the next time Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the Council decide to jack up your property taxes. Demand that they take Ald. Ed Burke down a peg first and bring the Chicago Bureau of Workmen’s Compensation into the 21st century.

Across the country, big cities have placed the responsibility for overseeing millions of dollars in payments to municipal workers injured or killed on the job under the control of a city department.

The New York City Law Department handles the Big Apple’s worker compensation claims. In Los Angeles, the city Personnel Department administers them.

But in Chicago? Here, the Bureau of Workmen’s Compensation, bizarrely, is under the purview of the City Council Committee on Finance. Under the city’s municipal code, it’s been that way since at least 1913.

That means the city’s $100 million-a-year workers’ comp fiefdom is headed by Burke, alderman of the 14th Ward and longtime Finance Committee chairman.

The municipal code also gives Burke alone the power to hire workmen’s comp employees. Audits of the bureau’s claim decisions are not required.

Inspector General Joseph Ferguson has no auditing oversight, thanks to a recent City Council “IG-Light” compromise that walled off workmen’s comp and other programs controlled by aldermen from IG audits.

Eugene Keefe of the Keefe, Campbell, Biery & Associates workers’ compensation defense law firm once called the city’s $115 million payout in 2011 workmen’s comp claims “staggering.”

“No municipality in the United States pays that much or anything close to that much for workers’ compensation benefits,” Keefe wrote back in 2012. “Finance Chairman Ed Burke has been running that money-hemorrhaging program with an iron fist and as secretly as it can be run for decades.”

We’ve seen little evidence that much has changed since – except that the city’s finances have worsened to crisis levels.

At a time when Chicago faces budget woes up the wazoo, the organizational structure of the Bureau of Workmen’s Compensation is a blazing example of bad government. It is rife with the potential for cronyism, waste and inefficiency just when Chicago has no pennies to spare.

Two aldermen are trying to bring this more than 100-year-old anomaly into the modern era.

A resolution by Aldermen John Arena (45th) and Scott Waguespack (32nd) calls for hearings into the city’s workmen’s comp practices by the City Council’s Committee on Budget and Government Operations.

The aldermanic pair want to hear exactly what procedures the Finance Committee uses to investigate and process claims and to check for fraud. They want to explore if it makes sense to move all these functions into the city’s executive branch — and if so, where.

They have suggested the city Law Department as one destination, although that city bastion could be busy at the moment battling nagging questions about police shootings.

Finance Committee officials insist workmen’s comp auditing is done. For at least the last two years, Aon Risk Solutions has conducted a “Workers’ Compensation Reserve Analysis and Forecast.” Those numbers are eventually plugged into the city’s Comprehensive Annual Financial Report.

The problem is, Waguespack said, the number crunchers “are given dollar amounts and they add them up and see if 2 plus 2 is 4. But they don’t look at how you got 2 plus 2.”

Pulling back the curtain on the operations of the city’s workmen’s comp program with a public hearing would be a welcomed move.

And graduating from such a hearing to a successful City Council ordinance that would amend the Municipal Code and put workmen’s comp in the executive branch would be even better. Doing so would make workmen’s comp subject to IG audits that aldermen recently prohibited with their gutted IG ordinance.

But this is Chicago.

Chances are, the Arena-Waguespack resolution will never make it to a hearing. The parliamentary maneuvering has already begun, aldermen say, with moves afoot to transfer the resolution to Burke’s Finance Committee. Or, it could sit forever in the Rules Committee, never to see the light of day.

And Chicago could remain stuck in the 1900s when it comes to workmen’s comp — but with 21st-century-sized workmen’s comp bills.