As a Georgia personal injury lawyer, I find that many of my clients have been hurt on the job, and the employer (usually through a workers' compensation insurance company) has paid some of their medical bills. My clients are often surprised when I tell them that at the end of their personal injury case, the employer or the workers' compensation insurance carrier will be standing there with its hand out, demanding that the clients hand over the money they just got. The employer will demand that my personal injury client repay all the medical bills and lost wages that the employer had paid in the first place.
The employer or insurance company's statutory claim for repayment is called a lien, or a subrogation lien. I am starting a series on the subrogation lien that workers' compensation carriers have when they have paid a client's medical bills.
I often represent personal injury clients who were hurt by someone's negligence, and the injury happened to occur while the client was working. For example, I represent car accident victims, and one of my car accident wreck clients was hurt when someone ran into the daycare van she was driving. In fact, I have had several clients who were hurt while they were driving a company vehicle - be it bus, van or car -- for work purposes. In my role as a product liability lawyer, I represented a delivery driver who was badly burned while she was driving a Dodge van that her company had rented for her to use. The Dodge van was hit from the rear, and exploded into flames. Its gas tank had been located in the very rear of the vehicle, and had no metal frame rail to protect it in a collision. In another of the cases I handled as a product liability attorney, my client had lost his hand when it was pulled into a defective carpet manufacturing machine while he was working at a carpet manufacturing plant. Another client had a product liability case because his leg was shattered when it was pulled into a defective carpet tufting machine at work.
All of these clients had one thing in common: they were hurt on the job and the employer or its workers' compensation insurance company had paid some of their medical bills. When my clients filed suit, the employers and insurance carriers claimed that if my clients recovered anything for their injuries, the clients needed to pay them back for every penny they had paid for the employee's medical care, lost wages, or other compensation.
Georgia law does provide that an employee should not be paid twice for the injury; if a third party was responsible for the employee's medical bills, then the workers' compensation carrier does not have to pay the employee a second time for the exact time for the exact same medical bills. The Georgia Code gives a workers' compensation insurance company the right to intervene in a case, and to demand repayment of the amounts it paid for the injured worker. O.C.G.A. § 34-9-11.1.
But the underlying purpose of the workers' compensation statute is to make sure that the employee is fully cared for: "The statute was enacted to allow an employer to recover the amount of workers' compensation benefits paid out, but a primary legislative concern was that the injured employee first be made whole." N. Bros. Co. v. Thomas, 236 Ga. App. 839, 841 (Ga. Ct. App. 1999). The purpose of the statute, then, is to make sure that when workers are hurt physically on the job, they do not end up getting hurt financially as well.
To accomplish that purpose, the Georgia code restricts the circumstances when an employer (or its insurance company) can demand that the employee pay back all the money the employer paid out. In my next posts, I will discuss those limitations.
