Last week, Gov. Tom Wolf signed into law Act 111 of 2018 which sought to address the concerns of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in Protz v. Workers’ Compensation Appeal Board (Derry Area School District), which had invalidated the section of the Workers’ Compensation Act pertaining to Impairment Rating Evaluations as unconstitutional. By way of background, in 2015, the Commonwealth Court held in its version of Protz that Section 306(a.2) of the act amounted to an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority to the American Medical Association, a private entity. The legislature had crafted the act to rely on “the most recent edition” of “The American Medial Association Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairments” (the AMA Guides) in performing IREs, which left it up to the AMA to define Pennsylvania law at its whim.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, for its part, did not specifically endorse the Commonwealth Court’s rationale that delegation of authority to a private entity is per se unconstitutional. However, unlike the Commonwealth Court which sought to rehabilitate the IRE provisions of the act with a remand and some ambiguous instructions, the Supreme Court found the entirety of Section 306(a.2) to be unconstitutional and void ab initio.

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