At the risk of professional self-decapitation, let me commitsome heresy: workers' compensation today is largely irrelevant.

I make the above statement as:

• An employer subject to an ever-increasing multitude ofemployment rules, regulations, statutes and court rulings thatpromulgate increased expense and continually fail to deliver toworkers efficient, timely services and benefits.
• An attorney who has personally witnessed the failure ofworkers' comp to deliver on its promises of expedient medicaltreatment and income protection for employees without protractedlitigation.
• An industry publisher who is witnessing a system that no longerprovides value to either employers or employees, and instead isused for profiteering by numerous peripheral vendors.

In addition, we now have a nationalmedical care reform agenda that I think will profoundly alter themedical component of workers' comp and, in my opinion, furtherdevalue workers' comp to employers and employees.

Workers' comp and medical insurance grew up as independentsystems, not because of efficiency or expediency, but because bothwere revolutionary in their origins and addressed problems broughtabout by the rapid industrialization of America.