The Effects of Provider Choice Policies on Workers’ Compensation Costs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To examine the effects of provider choice policies on workers' compensation medical and indemnity costs. DATA SOURCES/STUDY SETTING: Pooled cross-sectional analysis of administrative claims records for workers with work-related injuries primarily in 2007-2010 across 25 states (n = 4,489,729). STUDY DESIGN: We used linear and quantile regression analyses to evaluate differences in claim costs (medical and indemnity) based on whether policies give employers or injured workers control over the choice of provider. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We find no difference in average medical costs by provider choice policies, although a distributional analysis indicates higher developed medical costs for the costliest back injury cases in states where workers control provider choice. The evidence for indemnity costs is similar, although the point estimates also indicate (statistically insignificantly) higher average costs when policies give workers more control of the choice of provider. CONCLUSIONS: Our nuanced evidence suggests that policymakers seeking to reduce workers' compensation costs may need to focus on the highest cost cases in states where policy gives workers more control over the choice of provider, rather than the simpler and broader issue of whether policy gives workers or employers more control.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".