ABSTRACT
Disability compensation programs, usually coupled with medical (health-care) services, in the private and public sector have been based on the implicit assumptions in a biomedical model: that successful diagnosis and treatment of disease with accompanying restoration of health and rehabilitation to work is the primary incentive for the worker, their treating physician, and disability-plan administrators. Following a claim of injury or illness, an employee and their manager are assumed to be economically passive participants in a medical/disability process that replaces lost earnings, pays for necessary medical care expenditure, including whatever is feasibly required for work rehabilitation, and restores the worker to a productive job. Similarly, the health-care provider is assumed to be professionally capable of objective categorization of the health condition followed by appropriate (medically necessary) treatment and timely return of the worker to the job. Lastly, the administrator is assumed capable of gathering and interpreting medical and disability information needed to assure the integrity of the process and to provide timely wage replacement to the worker and medical treatment fees to the provider.
