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During the course of our representation of many injured workers, we come across questions like this one, what type of cervical surgery will be helping one to recover in an opportune time and be able to go back to work in a relatively short time? Anterior cervical discectomy and fusion (ACDF) is a surgery to remove a herniated or degenerative disc in the neck. Cervical disk replacement surgery involves removing a diseased cervical disk and replacing it with an artificial disk. Before this procedure was available, the affected disk was removed and the vertebrae above and below were fused together to prevent motion.

Here is the problem: if the negligent party bought minimum coverage ($25,000) and you don’t have any uninsured or under-insured coverage, but you have serious injuries that will require a lot of money to medically treat, you will not get millions. You may only get the $25,000 and you may have to seriously fight to get even that amount.

Are you tired of the insurance company controlling your medical treatment? It is your body, right? In a job injury in Georgia you may have little choice about control of your medical care. The law calls it a panel of doctors.

How do you define pain and suffering in an automobile accident claim? Is it like what a Justice on the US Supreme Court once said when asked what is pornography? He said: “I will know it when I see it.” Well, that is a little crazy! But so is pain and suffering. Here are a few factors:

Do you have a legal right to settle your workers’ compensation case? No, but many insurers will push you into a corner, then say they want to discuss settlement with you. If you are ready to settle, you need to sit down with your lawyer (me) and devise a strategy. Unrepresented workers tend to leave money on the table when they negotiate with the claims adjuster

How frustrating. This generic referral then allows the insurance company to re-assert control of your medical treatment in your workers’ compensation claim. This is done across the board by all Resurgens doctors. It is done for that very purpose. The key concept in all job injury claims is “who controls your medical treatment?”

Have you completed an Affidavit for your lawyer that will be part of your settlement demand package? What is in the Affidavit? The document should be a letter-like statement that comes from your heart. This document should state what you used to be able to do prior to the negligent driver plowed into your vehicle.

Has your medical treatment been unreasonably delayed? In your job injury claim many times the insurance adjuster or their lawyer either negligently or deliberately delay the treatment orders of the authorized doctor. Why does this happen so often these days? The insurance adjusters like to argue it is due to the COVID 19 Chinese Virus. Baloney. Many adjusters work from home and are connected through internet to the office main frame.

What is working under duress? No, it does not mean that your boss holds a gun to your head. It means having to perform your job, your household daily duties, shopping, and any activity with pain and difficulty after an automobile accident.

If I am fired for failing to return to a light duty job offered by my employer after my job injury, can I still receive workers’ compensation weekly benefits? Yes, you can but you will be fighting for 6 months to get these benefits.

Have you been diagnosed after an automobile accident that was not your fault as having a cervical or lumbar strain? Most doctors never get past this diagnosis. Yet, a strain of your neck or low back muscles, if present, can cause arthritis for which there is no cure.

It is the “in” thing to have armored trucks, tanks, all with SWAT teams at the ready, employ this lethal power on our streets. Look, I am not a liberal guy but I feel intimidated looking at an armored vehicle with military style dressed police officers pouring out of it to quell a potential disturbance.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

This blog is a bit off my usual writing subject matters but it is a hot topic among all of us with the Chinese Communist Wuhan virus still raging. Nursing homes were used by the Governor of New York to “store” or transfer the elderly. This act of stupidity caused the death count to soar in nursing homes in New York. Then to bar family members from seeing their elderly parents only added “insult to injury” and ultimately to greater deaths.

Larry Kudlow is the Chief economic advisor to the Trump Administration. Right after Memorial Day 2020, he made the following statement: “We welcome any American Companies in Hong Kong or China mainland, we will do what we can for full expensing and pay the cost of moving if they return their supply chains and their production to the United States.” A supply chain is a system of organization, people, activities, information and resources involved in supplying a product or service to the consumer. Take a forest for instance. Companies cut down the trees, transport them by big rigs to a lumber yard. At this location they are cut to various sizes. Then construction companies buy the finished product and transform the lumber into apartment complexes, home residences, store fronts, etc.

Prior to the Wuhan Corona virus rearing its ugly head around the world, an amazing number of US parents had enrolled their children in Mandarin language classes. Remember the 2008 Olympics put on by the Communist Chinese Party at the cost of $43 billion dollars? The propaganda value was amazingly effective. One of the main themes of the Olympics was “One World, One Dream.” Everyone thought this huge foreign power was going to become more westernized, more open, greener and less authoritarian. Well how do things look now, 12 years later? Certainly Communist China has not moved an inch, but the Western democracies have moved by leaps and bounds to open our doors to the Chinese.

Neil Young (of Crosby, Stills & Nash fame) once wrote of Alabama: “Alabama, you’ve got the rest of the Union to help you along, what’s going wrong?” Well, Neil, the times have changed and Alabama is a different state indeed! There are many factors that have changed Alabama into a highly technical workforce with a 3.3% unemployment rate and 80,000 new jobs (according to the Bureau of Labor statistics at the end of 2019).

Have we, as a nation, finally gotten to the point where we now see that the Communist Party of China is our true enemy? Over the last 30 years, our leaders, our Presidents, from Clinton to Bush to Obama, have allowed and encouraged our manufacturing of every product to shut their doors in the USA and move to China for the manufacturing. Maybe, just maybe, the Chinese Wuhan virus has a silver lining. After having almost brought our country to its knees, we now seem to be waking up to bringing our manufacturing plants back home. I am pleased to state that this is what President Trump has campaigned and has pushed for vigorously since he was inaugurated in January of 2017.

In these Covid-19 times, employers seem to be looking for ways to cut their payroll. That means terminating employees, whether a long time worker or not. While in Georgia, an employee may be terminated for a right reason, a wrong reason or no reason at all, if the employee is working while under disability related to a job injury, termination of employment does not terminate entitlement to receive workers’ compensation benefits.

It really bugs me when I hear those words “essential worker”. So if I am not considered to be an essential worker I must sit at home, on the sidelines so to speak, while others go to work, earn a paycheck and put food on their tables.

If a partially disabled worker quits work stating that the workplace is not safe due to Corona 19 virus outbreaks at the workplace, should the worker be entitled to an automatic resumption of full workers’ compensation benefits…and for how long?

When the China Wuhan virus began to rear its ugly head in Georgia, I saw it as a wonderful economic opportunity for insurance companies and their lawyers, the emissaries of “delay and deny”. Just look at all the elements of proof the innocent injured/affected worker will have to overcome to have their contracted virus considered a job injury

Now that the states are authorizing the re-opening of businesses to different degrees, businesses, large and small, want immunity from their workers if the business fails to provide a safe workplace. There are many businesses that upon re-opening, will clean and disinfect and provide for their workers a safe, Covid-19 free environment. They will be diligent.

Senator Tom Cotton, US Senator of Kansas, has introduced legislation in the US Senate to return pharmaceutical manufacturing to the USA. Before the Corona Virus crisis, no one paid much attention to our nation’s increasing dependency on the Communist Chinese for our medicine supply. China was and still is producing over 40% of the world’s supply of all the ingredients used to make our antibiotics. And, 97% of the US market for antibiotics are produced in China. Winston Churchill gave a speech in 1934, 5 years before the Nazi armies invaded Poland and Austria in World War II, stating: