If the Maine Workers Compensation Board worked as intended instead of as a labor-employer standoff, as it frequently does, the recent Maine supreme court decision allowing non-work-related injuries to be considered part of total disability wouldn’t be such a big issue. If the Maine tax system, its unemployment insurance and workers’ comp itself weren’t among the nation’s most burdensome, the decision would be manageable. If the decision itself didn’t land with a surprising thud, retroactively, on a Legislature that many thought had written a law solely about workplace injuries only to find it had not, the proposed remedy from the King administration would not be needed.

But all of these conditions exist, so not to act would be a mistake. The governor has offered legislation that says only work-related injuries may be considered, including retroactively, in accounting for someone’s degree of total injury under the comp system. That is not enough, however, because the issue of what is known as “stacking” – accounting for the cumulative effect of injuries – is complicated and cannot be solved by quick legislative votes in the next couple of days. Further, policies already are in place to direct the board to account for changes such as those brought by the court decision without the intervention of the Legislature. For these reasons, the administration’s bill should include a sunset provision for next year to force lawmakers to review these issues at length and with considerably more information than they have now and decide then whether the bill is still required.

First, there is little question that the court correctly interpreted the law, which simply says that disability is compensable when a work-related injury “aggravates, accelerates or combines with a preexisting condition…” No mention in the passage of pre-existing work-related condition. Second, the King administration bill continues the rules that most (although certainly not all) employees and employers thought were operating before the court’s February decision in Kotch v. American Protective Services. Last year after the court’s Bernard v. Mead decision, it is worth noting, Gov. King protected worker compensation levels based in part on the argument that the existing amount was what labor and management had assumed was correct.

Maine’s workers comp system assumes that permanent partial claims will equal 25 percent of total claims, and its board is supposed to set a threshold level of injury (currently at 11.8 percent, a suspiciously precise number) so that the 25-75 percent mix remains. If the board could reset the threshold quickly, the effect of the court decision would be small, certainly much smaller than the 15 percent comp increase and the predicted $160 million to $240 million in retroactive payments. But the four labor and four management members that make up the board don’t move all that quickly and can remain a stalemate for months. Still another reason to include a sunset provision is that the board should be heard on this issue at greater length than its expected testimony yesterday before the Labor Committee.

Certainly, Maine did not intend its workers’ comp system to be a general compensation system, as no other state does, so acting to temporarily prevent that while information is being gathered about the effect of the bill makes sense. Lawmakers could then return next year, absent the aura of impending crisis, debate the issue fully and include whatever modifications were necessary based on what they learn between now and then. Or the workers’ comp board members, with the sudden incentive not to become irrelevant on such an important topic, could find common ground and act to make the King proposal no longer needed. Mostly, the state needs time to work this out thoughtfully, which a sunset provision would provide.