California Insider

What would happen if Bobby Jackson were a workers compensation case?

The injured guard for the NBA’s Sacramento Kings – winner of last year’s Sixth Man of the Year Award for his stellar play as a substitute – played just one game down the stretch of the season and has missed the first round of the playoffs because of an injury to muscles in his abdomen. Jackson can walk, even run, and he can shoot. He drops in dozens of jumpers at practice every day. But when he tries to play at full-speed, the abdomen hurts, and he is afraid if he does play he will make the injury worse and perhaps endanger his career.

“It’s the type of injury where you can’t see anything on an X-ray, but it hurts like heck,” Kings coach Rick Adelman told the Sacramento Bee, noting that a similar injury kept him out of action for 11 months when he was a player. “I know very well that if Bobby could play, he’d play. And if he says he can’t, then there is nothing anybody can do about it.”

Jackson isn’t applying for workers comp, as far as I know. Unlike most workers, his contract pays him in full even if he is injured and cannot perform. But isn’t this exactly the kind of case that Republicans, led by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, were trying to eliminate from the workers compensation system? If a longshoreman or a drywall hanger suffered from the same kind of ailment, should he be compensated for his workplace injury?

Early drafts of the Republican bills would have required that disability benefits be based on “objective evidence” of an injury. They wanted to compensate only those injuries that were “measurable, reproducible and verifiable.” The old system, lawmakers complained, was too fuzzy, allowing workers to be compensated based on their word alone that pain was preventing them from doing their job. Advocates for injured workers, meanwhile, complained that this would also eliminate compensation for many legitimately injured workers who suffered from painful injuries that don't show up on an X-ray or MRI.

The final version of the bill, SB 899, didn’t go that far. But it does require the state to use American Medical Association guidelines to develop new ratings system for permanent disability. And its authors have declared that this would make the system more objective.

I wonder if it would disqualify the blue-collar Bobby Jacksons of the world.