BOISE, Idaho (Legal Newsline) - A worker who gained more than 100 pounds after he injured his back on the job might be able to obtain workers’ compensation for near-total disability, the Idaho Supreme Court ruled, reversing a state commission’s finding that the employee was responsible for becoming morbidly obese.
“Occasional lapses in judgment are a fact of the human condition,” the high court said in a May 18 decision, and since the goal of workers’ comp is to pay for workplace injuries regardless of fault the commission could only restrict the claimants’ benefits if his weight gain reflected “rash or deliberate disregard of a material risk.”
Daniel Sharp suffered a lower back injury while working for Thomas Brothers Plumbing in 2015. He was already obese at 250 pounds and five feet six inches tall, but after back surgery he started rapidly gaining weight until he reached more than 360 pounds.
Sharp filed for workers’ comp in April 2018, claiming he was totally disabled and seeking attorneys’ fees. An independent medical evaluation found he was nearly disabled and should be restricted to working no more than four hours per day, lifting nothing from the floor and no walking or standing for more than five minutes at a time.
At a March 2019 disability hearing experts agreed he was now disabled but disagreed on his level of disability after he had recovered from back surgery related directly to the workplace injury. The compensation commission in September 2020 ruled that his employer was responsible for some medical expenses but that Sharp’s weight gain wasn’t caused by a workplace accident and concluded he was 21 percent disabled.
Sharp appealed and the Idaho Supreme Court ordered a reconsideration, ruling the commission ignored state law, which requires it to assess the claimant’s “present” ability to work, which the court decided in 2012 means at the time of the hearing. Finally, the court said the commission improperly imported principles of tort law into its decision, including the idea Sharp’s obesity was a “superseding event” that reduced his employer’s liability.
“This is not a tort case,” and workers’ compensation law “is not synonymous with, nor a branch of, tort law,” the court said.
The fundamental test in tort law is fault – whether the defendant caused harm to the plaintiff. But with workers’ comp, fault isn’t required, only evidence the claimant suffered a workplace-related injury. There weren’t two injuries in this case, the court went on, “but a single, initially compensable injury that has been aggravated.”
“It is relevant that Sharp was repeatedly advised to lose weight but gained a large amount of weight instead,” the court concluded. “There were admonitions that Sharp lose weight, but nowhere does it appear he received any medical guidance.”