Gov. Cuomo Announces $400 Million Savings for the Empire State

Albany, NY (WorkersCompensation.com) - Gov. Andrew Cuomo let the Empire State know it would see $400 million-dollar savings in workers’ compensation costs this week.

"The reforms to the Workers’ Compensation system in this year’s budget will help New York businesses cut costs — enabling them to further reinvest, grow and create more jobs across the state," Gov. Cuomo said in a press release Monday. The Governor’s office announced the million-dollar cost saving news late afternoon after the New York Compensation Insurance Rating Board proposed an almost 4.5 percent rate decrease to begin Oct. 1., which is proposed to save hundreds of millions.

Gov. Cuomo’s announcement was welcomed by employers across the state, and the very agencies that brought about major reform in workers’ compensation, which undoubtedly directly affected the rate decrease, according to the Director of Government Affairs for The Business Council of New York State, Inc., Lev Ginsburg, in an interview with WorkersCompensation.com.

“It’s pretty powerful to see 65 logos across a page,” Ginsburg said of the Coalition, created by the Council. “Our membership was about 2,400 businesses in the state of New York with employers of all sizes and all kinds talking about the problem of the extreme cost of workers’ comp coverage.”

After working on a “variety of avenues” for reform for a year-and-a-half with the governor and legislator, Ginsburg, who also sits on the Board of Governors for the New York Compensation Insurance Rating Board, said the Council was “not really coming up with much as far as reform.” Rates also rose high.

“Last year the rates went up very significantly. It was 9.3 percent (plus), and at that point it became really clear that it was critical that something occurred,” Ginsburg said, specifically noting Senators Fred Akshar, George Amedore and John DeFrancisco.

“Altogether they brought a group of senators at the beginning of this legislative session who were like-minded and recognized that we really needed some relief,” said Ginsburg, who also runs the Business Council’s Amicus Curiae Program.

“Once we had a core of the Senate, we spent a lot of time educating the senators on the issues and the Business Council lobbied very, very hard with the Democrats and assembly as well, to put the issue on the table, which has traditionally been a very difficult place to get anything done in workers’ compensation,” Ginsburg said.

Senate Majority Leader John J. Flanagan also credits the senators. "When we were crafting a budget earlier this year, Senate Republicans including Senators Amedore, Akshar, Jacobs and others insisted that meaningful workers' compensation reform be part of those discussions — and we delivered,” Flanagan said in the Governor’s press release.

That delivery was in large part due to the assistance of The Business Council, said Ginsburg, noting the leading state council reached out to hundreds of representatives ranging from public, private and not-for-profit corporations that equal up to “tens of thousands of employers and millions of employees.”

“Everyone is an employer. Everybody pays workers’ comp in the state, and everybody was feeling the crunch,” Ginsburg said. “Quite frankly, the assembly was an obstacle as they usually are, but the Senate made it a high priority, hung tough and refused to let it fall off the table.”

Gov. Cuomo said, “with this rate decrease, New York is providing real savings to businesses helping to make them more competitive while strengthening protections for injured workers at companies across the state.” And Flanagan said, “(the) rate reduction announcement is the start to seeing the fruits of our labor and will save businesses, municipalities, and not-for-profits hundreds of millions of dollars so they can cut their costs, create jobs, grow for the future, and help achieve our goal of making New York more affordable.”

Noting Frank Sinatra as brilliant, Ginsburg said, “If you can reform workers’ comp in New York over the objections of an extremely powerful organized labor group and extremely powerful trial lawyers, I think that you can probably do it anywhere,” as reflected in the song, “New York, New York.”

“The truth of the matter was we were not asking for unreasonable things. We were looking to take bloat out of the system and essentially make sure the injured workers are very taken care of, maybe more than they were before, but to take some of the unneeded expense out of the system,” Ginsburg said. “These were exceptionally reasonable goals in a pretty unreasonable state. For other states, reform is possible anywhere.”

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