When a person is injured at work in Pennsylvania, and the injury is not accepted by the workers’ compensation insurance carrier, the injured worker must file a Claim Petition to seek benefits. Once the Claim Petition is filed, the insurance carrier has 20 days to file an Answer, responding to…
To prevail in a PA workers’ compensation case, typically the successful party presents the testimony of a medical expert, whose opinion is accepted by a Workers’ Compensation Judge (WCJ). This expert opinion must be “to a reasonable degree of medical certainty.” What is encompassed by those words is a bit…
There are several types of benefits which can be received by an injured worker in Pennsylvania. A comprehensive review of these benefits can be seen here on our website. One of those benefits is called “specific loss,” which contains things like loss of use of a body part and disfigurement…
When an employee in Pennsylvania gets injured, the PA Workers’ Compensation Act allots the workers’ compensation insurance carrier 21 days to investigate and accept or deny the claim. If 21 days is not sufficient, the insurance carrier can opt to issue a Notice of Temporary Compensation Payable (NTCP or TNCP),…
What if an injured worker in Pennsylvanian is employed by a company who (in direct violation of PA law) fails to carry workers’ compensation insurance? Back in the old days, the injured worker, through no fault of his or her own, would be stuck with whatever assets the employer had. …
Over the past several years, PA has legalized the use of medical marijuana. Given the current difficulties in dealing with the opioid epidemic, this would seem to be a reasonable tool to help injured workers (and anyone else suffering from chronic pain) deal with their conditions without the use of…
Under the Pennsylvania Workers’ Compensation Act, once an injured worker establishes that he or she has suffered a work-related injury, benefits continue until something happens. That “something” may be the injured worker returning to gainful employment, a doctor finding the injured worker fully recovered, or another change in situation. But,…
One of the pitfalls in the Pennsylvania workers’ compensation system is the concept of “withdrawal from the labor market.” Without intending to do anything but receive additional income, an injured worker in PA can easily cause his or her workers’ compensation benefits to stop accidentally. This is one of the…
A topic often litigated in the Pennsylvania Workers’ Compensation system is whether an injured worker was within the scope and course of his or her employment at the time of the incident. Accordingly, this is a topic that is no stranger to this blog. Though this area continues to depend…
A recent case in the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania touched on two interesting aspects of the PA workers’ compensation system. First, the Court dealt with the offset for Social Security Old Age benefits (personally, I find “Social Security Retirement” benefits a bit less offensive), under Section 204(a) of the Pennsylvania…