Oklahoma WC Changes Are OK, Says Court

The Oklahoma Supreme Court has ruled that recently-enacted changes to that state's Workers Compensation statutes are constitutional. The law, Senate Bill 1062, allows employers to opt out of the state administrative system, and create their own equivalent benefit plans for injured workers.

The OK law, modeled after a similar effort in Arkansas, eliminates the adversarial system for adjudicating Workers Compensation claims, and replaces it with an administrative system.

It will be interesting to watch this experiment unfold, to see if it truly improves outcomes for injured workers, as claimed, while also reducing costs for employers. Too often, it seems, one side of that equation suffers when the other improves.