Colorado: Two-Thirds of Osteoarthritis Claim Apportioned to Injured Employee

A Colorado appellate court affirmed an order apportioning two-thirds of an injured worker’s bilateral knee osteoarthritis to the employee, requiring the employer to pay just one-third of the worker’s medical expenses and other benefits, although the worker spent a 25-year career employed as a trailer mechanic, a job that required him to spend one-half of his work life on his knees. The court emphasized that the employer did not necessarily take the employee as it found him or her, that according to a medical specialist who performed an independent medical evaluation, the worker’s condition was caused by a combination of work-related and non-work-related factors, including the fact that the worker was overweight. The court, construing Colo. Rev. Stat. § 8–42–104(3), also left open the door to apportionment due to genetic predisposition factors.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is the co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Hutchison v. Industrial Claim Appeals Office, 2017 COA 79, 2017 Colo. App. LEXIS 696 (June 1, 2017)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 90.03.

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see