There’s a classical Roman maxim: “There are some cures worse than the disease.” Of course, we know what it means: There’s an actual problem, but the proposed solution will either fail to solve the problem, create more problems or kill the patient. And we must consider the source of the proposed miracle cure. Pennsylvania Rep. Ryan Mackenzie, whose district includes parts of Bucks and Lehigh counties, is developing expertise in proposing legislative “reforms” to our workers’ compensation legal system that are Trojan horses. They purport to solve a genuine crisis, but if enacted, would not help and, worse, will actually harm and create new difficulties for injured workers across Pennsylvania. That lobbyists and defense-oriented interests are using the opioid crisis for personal and corporate gain while putting injured workers and their doctors at a disadvantage, and then using their legislative appearances to dodge hard questions, is simply intolerable.
Even if these hypocritical proposals are unpacked from their casing and considered as the cost-cutting and “business growth” measures they truly are, they don’t stand up to initial scrutiny. In this instance, a legislative measure marketed as targeting opioid addiction is little more than an attempt to allow unelected political officials to dictate how doctors treat their patients for any workers’ compensation injury at all. This effort to legitimize an encroachment into the doctor-patient relationship, for profit and cost-cutting, should empower all of us to speak up on these “reforms” to fix something that isn’t really broken.
