Why Aren’t Iowa’s Injured Workers Allowed to Select Their Surgeons?

Injured workers in Iowa are a product; they have no right to pick their surgeon.

As an injured worker, in Iowa, you are a product. You are not anyone’s customer and certainly not the treating doctor’s customer.

The patient is not the same thing as a customer.

A customer picks the business to do business with.

In Iowa, injured workers are not picking doctors and clinics. They go where they are told to go.

They say when you are on Facebook, or any other social website where you do not pay a user fee, that it’s free because you are the product. In Iowa the injured worker is the product.

The authorized treating physician gets authorization to treat, not from the patient.

The authorized treating physician gets authorization from the employer, the insurance adjuster or the TPA. A TPA is a third-party-administrator.

The doctor knows the worker doesn’t pick him.

The patient is not the customer. The patient may not even trust the surgeon. The surgeon could care less if the patient does not trust him.

Clinics and hospitals know who their customers are – and those customers are not the injured worker.

Clinics and hospitals owe their allegiance to whoever directs patients to their billing departments.

Which means, as an injured worker, you are a product. And only a product. You are not the customer.

Here is the con of the Iowa Workers’ Compensation system.

It is your body. As a person earning their living by manual labor, the best outcome is essential to you being able to get back to doing what you do to earn a living, feeding your family and paying your bills.

But no one controlling this system cares about you as a person. And I mean ‘NO ONE’. Iowa’s leaders care more about votes and fooling voters than they do the individual rights of workers.

In Iowa, Governor Reynolds and the Republican-controlled Iowa Legislature preach smaller government and protection of individual liberties. But, that’s a lie. Because when it comes to injured workers getting to select their own surgeons, you have no say in the matter. And don’t let them tell you, there is always the alternative medical process. Because an Alt-Care Petition will fall on deaf ears with this Republican Party’s hand-selected pro-business-anti-worker Work Comp Commission. The deputies are scared to lose their jobs or worse to get transferred over to do unemployment hearings. The Commissioner was handpicked by Kim Reynolds to do her bidding and that means you lose. If there is any reason for you to lose, he will find it.

The Iowa Industrial Commissioner cares more about impressing Kim Reynolds than he does about whether or not you can put food on your table.

You can decide if you want a vaccine or not, but you cannot choose who can operate on you. The Republican Party’s claim to support individual liberties is an empty promise when it comes to injured workers. It is all a con to get votes from anti-vaccers.

The claims about individual liberties are just shiny objects used to distract you from what they are taking from you. You can’t eat what the Second Amendment produces (which is nothing) or the right to life issue. The right to own a gun or to not be able to get an abortion will never earn you a living. And none of this nonsense will ever make you better after a ruptured disc.

You are getting screwed by the Governor, you just won’t know it until it is too late to do anything about it.

The Lombardi Law Firm follows the motor vehicle accidents all across Iowa. We have represented over a thousand accident victims in almost every county in Iowa. If you have a question about your personal injury accident, call Steve at 515-222-1110 or email him at sdlombardi@aol.com. Contact form

The Lombardi Law Firm is a West Des Moines personal injury firm that is selective about which cases we take. We do not shoe every horse that comes in the barn. Nor do we advertise on buses or on TV. We are the peoples’ personal injury lawyers. We help people.

And no, it doesn’t cost you anything to call and just talk to us. Call to schedule a Zoom.