I am writing in reference to Tom Sawyer’s column on “Lawyers and comp” in the March 24 edition. Sawyer states that “prior to our new Workers’ Compensation system, only 40 cents of every insurance dollar actually went to the injured worker. Do we wish to return to a system controlled by the lawyers? I think not.”

The implication of this statement clearly is that lawyers were consuming most of the rest of the comp. dollar.

Your readers and Sawyer should be aware that according to the National Council of Compensation Insurers, which is the workers’ comp. insurance industry trade assocation, and Maine’s Bureau of Insurance, each dollar that an employer paid in insurance premiums in 1991 was spent as follows:

1. 30 cents to the insurance companies to run the system and make a profit.

2. 23 cents for medical bills for injured workers.

3. 43 cents for disability payments to injured workers.

4. 4 cents to injured workers’ attorney, for a total of $1.

Remeber, these are the insurance industry’s own figures for the former system which has now been repealed. Under the present system, insurance companies will not even have to pay the meager 4 cents to injured workers’ attorneys because insurance companies no longer have to pay employee’s lawyers.

Moreover, if Sawyer is correct and the “science of medicine” is all that is necessary to resolve disputes between injured workers and the insurance carriers, why employ hearing officers at all? It would be interesting to learn if any physician ultimately appointed as an IME would subscribe to Sawyer’s implied assertion that medicine is an exact science. My experience has been that physicians regard medicine as an art and that two reasonable physicians may in fact disagree regarding the nature and cause of any medical problems.

As an attorney with some familiarity with workers’ comp, I will not deny that litigation contributed to the expense of the former system, however, no more so than did health care providers, vocational rehabilitation providers and last, but not least, the insurance industry itself.

If Sawyer is representative of the knowledge base and impartiality of the other directors of the Maine Employers’ Mutual Insurance Co., I fear that we are in for continued trouble in the field of workers’ comp. Thomas J. Pelletier Caribou