Category: From Bob’s Cluttered Desk

Q&A Session Following the Opening Keynote at the 2026 WCRI Issues and Research Conference Following his opening keynote at the 2026 Workers' Compensation Research Institute Issues and Research Conference, Harvard health economist Dr. Benjamin Sommers sat down with WCRI CEO Ramona Tanabe for an extended Q&A session that drew pointed questions from the audience. If his keynote laid out the landscape of what's changing in American health coverage, the discussion…

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The workers’ compensation industry may soon feel the reverberations of sweeping changes to America’s health insurance landscape, according to Dr. Benjamin Sommers, who delivered the opening keynote address at the 2026 Workers’ Compensation Research Institute (WCRI) Issues and Research Conference here in Boston today. Dr. Sommers, the Huntley Quelch Professor of Health Care Economics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a practicing primary care physician, drew…

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There’s something happening in America that hasn’t happened in a generation. We’re building things again. Or at least, we’re talking very seriously about building things again. Approximately 230,000–250,000 manufacturing jobs were announced for reshoring or foreign direct investment in recent years, according to the Reshoring Initiative. The CHIPS and Science Act is transitioning from funding announcements to actual production facilities. Investment pledges are flowing. Politicians on both sides of the aisle are…

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It’s almost that time again. The time when some of the best and brightest minds in workers’ compensation converge on a frigid New England city to discuss the state of our beloved industry. Yes, the Workers Compensation Research Institute (WCRI) is once again hosting its annual Issues & Research Conference, this year running March 3-4, 2026, at the Westin Copley Place in Boston, Massachusetts. And it’s not just the industry’s…

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Thirteen years ago, in 2012, I had what seemed to me at the time to be a fairly simple idea: What if we stopped calling this industry “workers’ compensation” and started calling it “Workers’ Recovery” instead? Now, before you dismiss this as merely semantic navel-gazing from an industry blogger with too much time on his hands, hear me out. The idea was never about slapping a new label on an old product,…

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Those of you who have been reading this blog for any length of time know that I’m not shy about trumpeting accomplishments – mine, those of people I work with, or those of the broader industry when it gets something right. Today is one of those days. This week, January 12th and 13th, something historic is happening in Tampa, Florida. The Medicare Secondary Payer Accreditation (MSPA) certification program, the brainchild…

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For the past seven months, I’ve been viewing the world through what I can only describe as several layers of industrial-grade Saran Wrap. My right eye, which had faithfully served me over numerous decades, decided last June that it had seen enough of my shenanigans and essentially went on strike. Two weeks ago, I had surgery to address the problem, and I’m pleased to report that I am apparently healing…

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It is once again that time where I dust off my prognosticative pen, shake loose the cobwebs from my crystal ball, and pretend I have any idea what the coming year will bring. Regular readers of this blog, or anyone with a memory extending back more than twelve months, will recall that my predictive abilities have historically been somewhere between those of a Magic 8-Ball and a drunk meteorologist. My…

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For years, those of us in the workers’ compensation trenches have watched claims spiral out of control not because of the severity of the physical injury, but because of what’s happening between the injured worker’s ears. Now WCRI has done us all a favor by quantifying what every seasoned claims professional has suspected: psychosocial factors are rampant in workers’ comp claims, and they’re wreaking havoc on recovery outcomes. The new…

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A Note from Bob: While writing this article I decided to get AI’s take on the topic. The response was prescient, on point, and damn frightening. Turns out I wasn’t needed for this article at all. It is enough to scare the crap out of anyone… ________________________________________ While it has not yet been defined as a clinical diagnosis, an emerging issue known as “AI Psychosis” has been causing concern among health…

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