A workers' compensation measure passed this week by the Hawaii Legislature over a gubernatorial veto softens doctors' medical treatment guidelines for injured workers, according to an insurance trade group representative.

Governor Linda Lingle's veto of SB 1808 was overridden in a special session Tuesday. The measure will alter the State Department of Labor's newly adopted workers' comp regulations.

Samuel Sorich, a representative of the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America, said that the PCI saw the original regulations as "a good guidance and framework for determining the appropriateness of medical treatments."

Mr. Sorich said the department's initial regulations could have produced a better mechanism to control costs on workers' compensation premiums in Hawaii.

Those rules, which Gov. Lingle approved in May, would have, among other changes, required doctors treating injured workers to adhere to treatment guidelines established by the American College of Occupational & Environment Medicine.

Mr. Sorich said in an interview that during the debate over the guidelines, critics of the regulations, particularly Democrats, said they felt the governor had overstepped her administrative authority.

Democrats, he said, felt that the Department of Labor was enacting laws rather than implementing them. As a result, one of the new definitions in the Hawaii workers' comp law will read as such: "Guide" or "guidelines" means an indication of a suggested criteria, course or means to a particular end, and not an authoritative or exclusive prescription which limits the exercise of independent judgment, expertise or care.

A full copy of SB 1808 is online at

http://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/sessioncurrent/bills/sb1808_cd1_.htm

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