Friday, April 23, 2021 | WorkCompCentral published a blog post by workers’ compensation defense attorney Gregory Grinberg critiquing AB 1465, a bill that would expand access to medical care by creating a statewide medical provider network. Daniel Rosenberg Ignoring Grinberg’s ad hominem attack on Sen. Lorena Gonzalez, his argument is that MPNs lead to higher quality and reduced costs, and therefore should be maintained without free-market competition. The problem is that his points are empirically false: MPNs increase costs for employers and lead to worse medical care for their injured workers. The California Workers’ Compensation Institute did a comprehensive study of MPNs and found that they generated a negligible 2% in savings. Those savings were more than offset by added frictional costs to the system, as a Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine study concluded. Worse still, a recent study by the Workers’ Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau demonstrated that delays in medical treatment, often the result of the broken MPN system, were a significant driver of downstream costs to employers. Injured workers who don’t receive treatment within the first 30 days are 40% more likely to have permanent disability awarded.