Does Workers’ Compensation Cover Medical Care for Illnesses and Disease?

Contrary to common belief, workers’ compensation doesn’t just cover injuries or accidents at work. It also covers and protects you from illnesses that you might contract on the job, under certain circumstances.

Difficulties With Illnesses

Illnesses can present problems in workers’ compensation cases, because part of the requirement in making a workers’ compensation claim is that your injury is caused by your work–it is work related in some way.

But the reality is that when we get sick, we often don’t know for certain who got us sick, or where we were made sick. And many of us are exposed to germs and disease and viruses, in our everyday, non-work life.

So if you are sick, and you believe that your illness was caused by your work environment, can you make a workers’ compensation claim?

Related to Your Job

Florida law says that in order to get workers’ compensation in these situations, there must be something unique about your work environment that exposes you to a higher likelihood of getting an illness than the general public would experience.

As an example, imagine that you are a secretary at an accounting office, and you get sick. You could not make a workers’ compensation claim for that; your work doesn’t expose you to any more or less germs or disease than the general public is exposed to on a day to day basis.

On the other hand imagine you work at a day care, where young children notoriously are sick, or may have bad hygiene, or who may spread disease simply because they’re kids and aren’t aware to protect others. That is certainly an environment which is more likely to expose someone to illness or disease, than the general public faces.

There must be some support that your work environment is more likely to expose you to disease. So, we know that those working with kids are more likely to get illnesses, just as we know that someone who works in a doctors office would be more likely to contract illnesses.

Pre-Existing Conditions

Sometimes, someone might have pre-existing conditions which make them more likely to get sick, or which may make their sickness worse.

Just look at COVID, where some people ended up dead or on ventilators, while others experienced it as “just a bad cold.” We all react differently even to the exact same exposure to the exact same illness.

In that case, the court will look to see if work was a major contributing cause to your illness–that means that even if you had some underlying condition that makes your illnesses worse or more severe, you still can get workers’ compensation or contracting an illness at work.

Remember the Time Limit

One problem that a lot of people have in these cases, is that they miss the 30 day time frame to report workers’ compensation claims. People may not even know, realize or think that their workplace could have caused their illness–by the time they connect the dots, it is past the 30 day window, and too late.

Did you get an illness at work, and need to make a workers’ compensation claim? Schedule a consultation with the Tampa workers’ compensation lawyers at Barbas, Nunez, Sanders, Butler & Hovsepian today.

Source:

myfloridacfo.com/division/wc/pdf/wc-system-guide.pdf