While consumer prices for energy, food and housing between 2021 and 2022 saw drastic increases, there’s little evidence such inflationary pressures affected workers compensation medical costs, according to a report released Thursday by the Workers Compensation Research Institute.
The study identified the main drivers of the workers comp medical cost growth, finding that a major contributor to price increases in the general health care system was the growth in hospital payments and that similar patterns were found in workers comp.
Researchers also found evidence that workers comp fee schedules are “effective tools to temper medical inflation for professional prices to levels similar or below those in the general health care system.”
States that updated their fee schedule rates based on inflationary growth in the general economy rather than within the medical sector started to see faster price growth in 2022, WCRI said.
This article was first published in Business Insurance.
