How California Handles the WCMSA Process, by Robert G. Rassp, Esq. There is a garden industry that has emerged since 1997 in California of companies who have become "WCMSA specialists", promoting themselves as experts in developing WCMSA proposals that will pass muster with CMS. Most workers' compensation legal practitioners who represent injured workers do not practice Social Security disability law, and the issues of the "80% rule" for Social Security disability offsets and the criteria for requiring a WCMSA are completely foreign to them. > Read more.

Permanent Disability; Rating; Permanent Total Disability. WCAB affirmed WCJ's finding that applicant, who sustained 12/17/2003 industrial injuries to his cervical spine, left upper extremity and lumbar spine, incurred permanent total disability, when WCAB found that LC 4662 addresses permanent total disability and LC 4660 addresses permanent partial disability, that specific constraints of LC 4660(b)(1) and (2) are not necessarily applicable to a determination of permanent total disability "in accordance with the fact" pursuant to LC 4662, that WCJ thoroughly analyzed evidence in this case and, although he did not specifically cite LC 4662, he did find permanent total disability "in accordance with the fact," as opposed to using descriptions in AMA Guides pursuant to LC 4660, that WCJ correctly interpreted "total loss of earning capacity" as term is used in 2005 PDRS to mean a total loss of pre-injury earning capacity, and recognized that everyone has a particular combination of education, experience, and intellectual and physical characteristics that generally affect earning capacity but have no specific bearing on a permanent disability determination, and that WCJ correctly concluded that, based upon evidence, sole cause of applicant's total loss of earning capacity was his medical condition. See Cordova panel decision. 

Reminder: Check the subsequent history of a panel decision before citing to it.

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