Denial of health claims for GE workers demands inquiry

Our GE Occupational Health Advisory Committee is deeply upset by the way the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) has gone about reviewing previously denied claims.

This reinforces our conviction that the board’s policies and practices need to be subject to a public inquiry with a view to radically reforming Ontario’s worker compensation system. This latest reconsideration process overturned 71 of 233 previously denied claims — but the lion’s share remain denied.

Every one of the denied claims was subjected to major systemic obstacles to disease recognition at the board. These include:

An onerous burden of proof that was recently rejected by the Supreme Court of Canada.

Overemphasis on workers’ medical histories rather than exposures at work and scientific evidence of harm

Disregard of cancer clusters as evidence of work-relatedness.

Ignoring workers’ doctor’s assessments — relying instead on the board’s consulting doctors.

The refusal to consider long-term exposure to a complex mix of chemicals in the absence of exposure controls, which have been documented at GE.

One glaring example involves the denial of esophageal cancers despite strong and consistent scientific evidence showing that workers exposed to metal working fluids have an11-fold increased risk of esophageal cancer. Metal working fluids were heavily used at the GE plant without effective controls with 30 to 40 years of exposure; yet the board sought to blame it on acid reflux which has only a slight association with esophageal cancer.

These issues are not new and not isolated. They have been explored by medical and legal scholars since the early 1980s.

There are other spurious impediments to just compensation. For example, in 2010, the board instituted an austerity program that involved proactively denying workers’ claims without evidence. These were the findings of the Industrial Accidents Victims Group of Ontario (IAVGO) after a review of the Appeals Tribunal decisions indicating that there was “no evidence” to support the denials. This resulted in: A doubling of denied claims between 2010 and 2015.

A decline in workers’ benefits by 33 per cent.

The pressuring of doctors to change their medical reports.

Increased rebates to employers by over 100 per cent.

More recently, information obtained under a freedom of information request indicated that the board implemented a blanket “negative entitlement” policy for miners who claimed neurological damage from exposure to McIntire Powder without evidence, thus refusing to address such claims on their own merits.

In effect, an organizational “culture of denial” at the WSIB informs the way physicians, hygienists, adjudicators and other policy-makers operate at the board. This is illustrated in the tendency of board doctors to discount weak studies supporting a causal association while exalting weak studies that do not support an association.

This “culture of denial” that pervades the entire organization results in only a small fraction of diseases being recognized as work-related, and consequently distorts assessment for regulatory and prevention purposes while shifting the burden of work-related disease onto our public health care system. This, in itself, is a major reason for a public inquiry.

The current system needs to undergo a public inquiry followed by a complete overhaul to create a just and fair compensation system that serves the needs of injured workers and their families, which was the original intent of Chief Justice William Meredith, who pioneered our workers’ compensation system in 1914.

Instead, we have a corrupted version of what has evolved into a private insurance company hell bent on fleecing benefits from injured workers.