United States: UIM Insurer May Not Offset Workers' Compensation Benefits Received by Plaintiff

Construing Colorado law, a federal district court held that in a suit to recover UIM benefits under an insurance policy issued to plaintiff by the defendant insurance company, evidence related to the plaintiff’s prior recovery of medical expenses, wages, and other benefits through workers’ compensation should be excluded. The defendant argued that evidence of such a collateral source should be presented to a jury, lest the plaintiff enjoy a double recovery. The district court noted that an almost identical issue had been determined by the Tenth Circuit a few weeks earlier, in Adamscheck v. American Family Mut. Ins. Co., 2016 U.S. App. LEXIS 5753 (Mar. 29, 2016). The court also cited earlier Colorado decisions in which state courts had held that workers’ compensation benefits are received as a result of an employee’s contract with the employer and, therefore, fall within the contract exception to the collateral source rule. Workers’ compensation benefits were not, therefore, from a true “collateral” source.

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 Jones v. Esurance Ins. Co., 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 51585 (D. Colo., Apr. 18, 2016)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 110.05.

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

For more information about LexisNexis products and solutions connect with us through our corporate site