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Last Thursday, June 9^th 2016, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that Florida’s 104 week limit on workers’ compensation total temporary disability benefits is unconstitutional.

A paramedic and firefighter for the city of St. Petersburg, Florida sustained compensable injuries to his back and knee in 2009. Bradley Westphal received back surgery and additional medical treatment for nerve damage to his legs.  But after reaching the 104 week limit, he tried to get total permanent disability benefits.   However, in Florida there is not the practice of permanent disability advances based upon a prediction of permanent disability. 

A Florida judge denied the claimant’s request because he simply hadn’t reached maximum medical improvement.  The judge acknowledged the severity of the claimant’s injuries and inability to obtain employment, but that he fell into a “statutory gap” of being no longer able to receive temporary benefits but not yet eligible for total permanent disability benefits.

Westfall passed nine months without any disability indemnity payments before his employer decided he was entitled to permanent disability benefits.  Florida’s 1^st District Court of Appeal in Tallahassee, Florida, awarded Westphal 260 weeks of total disability benefits in February 2013. 

In 1991, the Florida Legislature has reduced injured workers’ available total temporary disability benefits from 350 to 260 weeks.   Then in 1994, it reduced it down to 104 weeks.   Then the Florida Supreme Court on Thursday in a divided ruling overruled the appellate court’s decision, ruling that the 104 week statute is unconstitutional because it deprives injured workers of disability benefits for an “indefinite amount of time” and creates a system that “no longer functions as a reasonable alternative to tort litigation.” 

It was a 5-2 ruling that stated the appellate court “valiantly attempted to save the statute from unconstitutionality” by deciding that injured workers who fall into the statutory gap wouldn’t be cut off from compensation after 104 weeks.  However, the statute “deprives a severely injured worker of disability benefits at a critical time, when the workers’ cannot return to work and is totally disability, but the workers’ doctors – chosen by the employer – determine that the worker has not reached maximum medical improvement.”

The dissenting judges rejected the argument that Westfall and like workers in his type of situation are denied access to the courts.  But the winning ruling responded to Westfall’s argument that the limit on total temporary disability violates his right to access to the courts by expressing “there must eventually come a ‘tipping point’ where the diminution of benefits” does not provide a reasonable alternative to tort litigation.  

lonce@adjustercom.com