A clean
sweep in
Augusta
Gov. Baldacci has every right to be agitated at the Workers’ Compensation Board because its directors are incapable of working together. Board disagreements have spawned lawsuits and stalled compensation awards and appeals, slowing financial help for injured workers and costing businesses unnecessary time and money.
The constantly-at-odds board now believes the governor has withheld funding from his secondary budget for the Worker Advocate program as punishment for its poor performance. The $1.6 million funding cut eliminates legal counsel for workers who cannot afford to hire their own attorneys, something guaranteed under the 1996 workers compensation reform work.
If it’s true that the governor is punishing this board, it’s tough to blame him. Baldacci has very few tools with which to get the board’s attention. Unfortunately, sacrificing legal advocates punishes workers far more than it does directors.
What Baldacci must do instead is wipe this board clean. Remove every director and start fresh.
It’s safe to say that taking a few months to appoint a new board won’t interfere with progress since directors don’t get along well enough to do any work now anyway.
Directors on this Workers’ Compensation Board go through a thorough nomination and confirmation process before receiving a governor’s appointment. Removal is less rigorous and is permitted, after a hearing in executive session before the State and Local Government Committee, for inefficiency, willful neglect of duty or malfeasance in office. There is also an impeachment option to rid the system of this board.
Malfeasance does not apply, but the governor can easily make a convincing case that the current board is highly inefficient and has willfully neglected its duties and its responsibilities to business and to workers.
Baldacci is quite busy pushing passage of health care and tax reforms, but he cannot permit this Legislature to adjourn without setting the Workers’ Compensation Board right.
Directors must be replaced.
A fit of anger
State Trooper Derrick Record was way out of line to arrest and detain Ed Miller for not revealing the names of patients seen at Tri-County Mental Health Services Inc. in Farmington one day last month. He must be reprimanded.
The officer, who is not new to police work, handcuffed Miller, put him in a cruiser and took him to jail because this unit supervisor refused to turn over clients’ names, names that are shielded under federal and state health care privacy laws and which the officer had no legitimate claim to view.
Maine is one of many states that holds patient-psychotherapist privilege sacred. Mental health agencies may not turn over client names or medical records to law enforcement unless the information is required to locate a fugitive or the patient is a victim of a crime. In this case, the trooper demanded names so he could identify who damaged his cruiser.
Placing Miller under arrest and threatening other staff members with similar action is a consequence of the growing tolerance for police power superseding civil protections. A tolerance born of John Ashcroft and fostered by the Bush administration and one that endangers citizen freedom and privacy in this land of supposed liberty.
jmeyer@sunjournal.com
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