As part of its continuing, serial coverage of issues in Hawaii’s workers’ compensation system, the Honolulu Civil Beat set out to investigate whether an influential physician is an advocate for injured workers or a bagman who helps employers skirt liability for occupational injuries.

Dr. Chris Brigham

Dr. Chris Brigham describes himself as being pro-worker, according to the latest Civil Beat report. During the 2017 National Workers’ Compensation and Disability Conference and Expo in Las Vegas, Brigham said injured workers should not be treated as disposable items.

Brigham says some injured workers are being “needlessly disabled” and taught that their injuries are worse than they actually are. One reason for this is the financial incentive to play up the extent of an injury.

“How do you ever get well if you have to continually demonstrate you have a problem?” he told Civil Beat.

Bigham also said its his opinion that some doctors in Hawaii and other states “are using injured workers as pawns for their financial gain."

Bigham has opposed workers’ compensation bills in Hawaii. And he was one of the doctors who worked on the sixth edition of the American Medical Association’s Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment, which reduced disability ratings for some injuries.

He talked to WorkCompCentral about the changes to the AMA guides in 2016.

Brigham’s push for most objective evaluations of injured workers has earned him plenty of critics who, according to the Civil Beat report, characterize him as someone who “worked tirelessly across the nation and even outside the U.S. to slash benefits.”

Steven Birnbaum, a claimants’ attorney with offices in Honolulu and California’s Bay Area, said he doesn’t buy the argument that some people only think they’re disabled. Workers’ compensation payments do not fully replace lost wages, and there is no incentive for malingering in the system, he said.

Rather than doctors and lawyers trying to persuade an injured worker that he or she is disabled, Birnbaum said, more often its the case that workers are trying to persuade a doctor to clear them to return to work.

The full report is here.