Alaska would change who can question the medical report in a workers' comp fight

Get hurt at work in Alaska, file a claim, and have your employer fight it, and two things about that fight would change under rules the state has proposed. One is whether you can question the person who wrote the report used against you. The other is how the lawyer who took your case gets paid.

The Alaska Workers' Compensation Board and the Department of Labor and Workforce Development want to rewrite the board's procedural rules. Written comments are due by 5 pm on Oct. 9, and an oral hearing is set for Oct. 15 in Anchorage and over Zoom.

A new section would lay out how a party goes about cross-examining the author of evidence filed with the board, medical and otherwise. Workers' compensation cases usually turn on medical reports, and who gets to question the doctor who wrote one, and under what conditions, decides a lot of claims.

The second change is narrower and lands on attorneys. Fee applications could no longer use block billing, the practice of folding several tasks into a single time entry. Granular entries are easier to scrutinize, and in workers' compensation the losing employer often ends up paying the injured worker's legal fees.

A third change runs the other direction, at employers. A business that fails to carry workers' compensation coverage for more than 180 consecutive days would have that treated as an aggravating factor, which raises what the state can penalize it.

The notice, and instructions for filing a comment, are on the state's online public notice system at http://notice.alaska.gov/225013.