Underwriting results for the workers’ compensation insurance industry improved for the second year in a row, as discussed by Elizabeth Yates and John Burton in "Workers’ Compensation Insurance Industry Returns to Profitability in 2003." Indeed, the overall operating ratio, which is the most comprehensive measure of underwriting experience because it considers investment income, was 97.8 in 2003, indicating that the industry was marginally profitable. While this is a significant improvement for the industry, the level of profitability of the late 1990s has not been achieved.

Back pain is both common and costly. But do policymakers and practitioners in the workers’ compensation field use the proper conceptual framework to deal with disabling back pain? In "Back Pain: Acute Injury or Chronic Disease?" William Johnson argues there are serious problems because often we treat back pain as an accidental injury rather than as an episodic, recurrent condition. One consequence is that often the evaluations of the effectiveness of different approaches to treating back pain are biased because they rely on first return to work as a measure of success, thus ignoring the relapses that many workers experience.

States differ in the statutory design and the implementation of the benefits provided by their workers’ compensation programs. In "Workers’ Compensation Benefits: Frequencies and Amounts 1995-2000," Florence Blum and John Burton provides three types of data for six years for most states: the frequency of claims for four types of cash benefits and for medical benefits; the average benefits per claim for these types of benefits; and the benefits per 100,000 workers for the four types of cash benefits and for medical benefits. One striking result is the decline in total frequency of cases paying cash and/or medical benefits between 1995 and 2000.

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