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Sedgwick may have been established as a regional claims administrator in 1969, but it has since grown into a global provider of technology-enabled risk, benefits, and integrated business solutions, with 21,000 employees spread across 65 countries. The company’s solutions span from casualty risk to benefits, and property and loss adjusting to marine claims, alongside offering innovative technology platforms and global expertise in areas such as workers’ compensation, liability, property, disability, and absence management.

The Sedgwick Institute serves as an incubator for some of the best and brightest minds to advance the conversations that affect all the players in our industry, including injured and ill members of the workforce, insurance carriers, employers, property owners, third party claims administrators, brokers, lawmakers and medical providers.

The Sedgwick Institute has released a new book that takes a critical look at the workers’ compensation market and what the future holds for the industry.

Authored by Dr. Richard A. Victor of the Sedgwick Institute, “SCENARIOS FOR THE 2030s: Threats and Opportunities for Workers’ Compensation Systems” discusses the workers’ compensation-related challenges faced by US employers, as well as injured workers, lawmakers, and practitioners of occupational medicine. The book highlights the importance of workers’ comp and how such systems have remained despite social and economic changes.

Dr. Victor was appointed to the senior fellow position at Sedgwick Institute in 2016. He is the former founder and CEO of the Worker’s Compensation Research Institute.

One of the key topics discussed in Victor’s book is that workers’ compensation insurance costs could triple from 2016’s levels, while injured workers see no real change to their benefits. Victor observed in his studies that both employers and worker advocates have agreed that the systems could be “out of balance,” despite attempts to file through legislation and regulatory reforms.

This book also explores some of today’s most perplexing questions:

— Is there a plausible scenario where many state workers’ compensation systems remain in a dangerously unbalanced state?
— And where the workers’ compensation reform process is unable to restore a reasonable balance: What might cause that imbalance? What are the threats? Where are the opportunities?
— Why will the workers’ compensation reform process be unlikely to deliver effective solutions?
— What might replace state workers’ compensation systems?

“I am very fortunate that the Sedgwick Institute supported this work. It provides an opportunity to provoke system stakeholders to think outside the box about upcoming challenges to be faced by a critical part of our nation’s social safety net,” commented Victor.

“With more than 30 years of experience in insurance and large global corporate risk management, I am pleased to have the Sedgwick Institute stand behind a book that truly shines a light on the complexity and importance of the industry and the challenges that it faces,” said Sedgwick Institute director and Sedgwick senior vice-president of strategic solutions Christopher E. Mandel.