I recently spent four days in Orlando with some 8,000 workers' compensation insurance professionals, from claims adjusters to attorneys, agents, brokers, and experts from the provider and medical arenas. Presented for the 25th year by the non-profit Florida Workers' Compensation Institute, the 66th annual Workers' Compensation Educational Conference has become a must-attend event that reaches far beyond our state's borders and draws participants and speakers from across the nation.

Florida, however, is always uppermost in my mind, and I had the opportunity to visit with our CFO Jeff Atwater, who addressed the gathering. The National Council on Compensation Insurance (NCCI) had made its annual Florida rate filing just days before, so I asked Atwater if the 8.9-percent increase was a number he could support.

Prefacing his remarks by saying that he had not yet seen the filing or response, Atwater acknowledged that given the "significant rate decline over the last number of years … it is probably not unpredictable that the industry is showing a need for some increased rates. I don't think that it's unreasonable where they are coming out, but I do think that everything needs to be justified in the end." In its filing, NCCI noted, as did Atwater, rising medical costs as one of the criteria for the call of higher rates. NCCI additionally said that the improvements generated by the 2003 reforms have now fully played out, and that claims frequency has been rising significantly since 2009 after several years of decline.