Workers' compensation or workers' comp is a form of insurance providing wage replacement and medical benefits to employees injured in the course of employment in exchange for mandatory relinquishment of the employee's right to sue his or her employer for the tort of negligence. The trade-off between assured, limited coverage and lack of recourse outside the worker compensation system is known as “the compensation bargain.” One of the problems that the compensation bargain solved is the problem of employers becoming insolvent as a result of high damage awards. The system of collective liability was created to prevent that and thus to ensure security of compensation to the workers.
Despite length of symptom duration prior to anterior cervical discectomy and fusion in Workers' Compensation patients, demonstrated improvements in disability and arm pain. Patients with a lesser symptom duration (SD) also demonstrated improvements in physical function and neck pain. Patients with a lesser SD demonstrated superior scores in physical function, pain, disability, and mental health and were more likely to achieve clinically significant improvement in physical function. Patients with a greater symptom duration SD were more likely to achieve clinically significant improvement in mental health 1).