Medical comp payments fall 9.4% in 2020 in California
Medical payments fell to $1.8 billion in calendar year 2020, down 9.4% compared to the approximately $2 billion in medical payments for 2019, according to a report from the Workers’ Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau of California.
The WCIRB said the significant decline in overall medical payments was largely driven by a sharp drop in the number of claims during the pandemic.
The approximately 559,000 claims filed last year were down 14.5% compared with the 654,000 claims in 2019. The total number of paid medical transactions fell about 11.4% to 13 million in 2020 from about 14 million in 2019.
Average medical payment per claim of $3,198 represented a 5.9% increase over the average $3,003 medical payment per claim in 2019. The increase in average medical payment per claim, along with the 3.6% increase in the number of transactions per claim, could be the result of a decrease in smaller medical-only claims last year, according to the report.
The WCIRB also reports that physical medicine and rehabilitation procedures are the fastest growing physician services, and the use of analgesic anti-inflammatory drugs increased more significantly than any other group.
The bureau reports that the share of medical payments for pharmaceuticals continued to decline, as did the share of payments for controlled substances.
“The share of all claims with at least one opioid prescription declined significantly by 54% from early 2018 to late 2020,” the report reads.
Tulare and Inyo counties had the highest share of claims involving opioid use since 2018, while the Los Angeles Basin and Silicon Valley regions had the lowest share of opioid use in the state.
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