Insurance companies are required to investigate workers’ compensation claims. They are suppose to pay credible claims and dispute claims that should not be covered. The insurance company receives premiums from the employer to handle the cost of the employer’s claims.

The money paid in premiums is money that could have gone to increase the employee’s wages. But, instead is used to care for those same workers who become injured on the job.

But, what happens when the insurance company uses the money meant to care for the workers to hide the facts of a claim?

In today’s story, we present a twenty-two-year-old female that inserted evenflow spouts on gallon soap bottles and then she screwed on the lids. Her job quota was 654 bottles an hour. She did this exact task twelve hours a day, six days a week. As a result, she started to have problems in her right hand. Her hand would feel like it was burning and she had problems moving her thumb.

She went to the doctor. After the evaluation, the medical provider determined that the hand problems were from the work she was doing.

When the claim was turned into the insurance company, they denied the claim and stated that the job was not repetitively traumatic. The young lady had a co-worker get a video of her line operation. It showed a man inserting the spouts, securing them with a plastic sledge hammer and quickly fastening on the lids.

Once the video was shown to the insurance company, instead of accepting the claim, they had the young lady and the co-worker fired. They hired an ergonomic specialist to create videos of the line and how it operated. They invested a lot of money in trying to change the facts shown on the video provided by the co-worker.

Fortunately for the young lady, MLF Legal was handling her claim. In the Contested Case Hearing, it was shown that the true video of the work demonstrated that it was repetitively traumatic and the insurance company’s video was just a recreation of the work.

The money spent by the insurance company was wasted and should have been used to provide the proper treatment to allow the young lady to recover.