Iowa: Employee May Collect Both PPD and PTD at Same Time For Successive Injuries

The Supreme Court of Iowa held that Iowa workers’ compensation law does not prohibit an employee from collecting both PPD benefits and PTD benefits at the same time where the employee suffers successive injuries at the same workplace. The court indicated the general assembly removed the legal barrier to this outcome in 2004. The court said it generally could not apportion the benefits from two successive work-related injuries without a statute allowing the court to do so. The court added that under Iowa Code § 85.34(7), apportionment could be sustained when an employee suffered an industrial injury causing, for example, a 15 percent PPD followed by an injury causing a 30 percent PPD at the same employer. PTD benefits, however, are not subject to apportionment under the statute. The court detailed the history of the statute and indicated that its job was “to follow what the legislature actually drafted in 2004, not what it might have wanted to draft.” As to the employer’s argument that the court should be guided by the legislature’s statements of intent surrounding the 2004 amendments, the court poetically replied, “These swirling cross-breezes in a statement of intent cannot steer us in a different direction from the prevailing current of actual statutory language.”

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 JBS Swift & Co. v. Ochoa, 2016 Iowa Sup. LEXIS 118 (Dec. 30, 2016)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 92.02.

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