From Bob's Cluttered Desk

Q&A Session Following the Opening Keynote at the 2026 WCRI Issues and Research Conference Following his opening keynote at the 2026 Workers’ Compensation Research Institute Issues and Research Conference, Harvard health economist Dr. Benjamin Sommers sat down with WCRI CEO Ramona Tanabe for an extended Q&A session that drew pointed questions from the audience. If…

The workers’ compensation industry may soon feel the reverberations of sweeping changes to America’s health insurance landscape, according to Dr. Benjamin Sommers, who delivered the opening keynote address at the 2026 Workers’ Compensation Research Institute (WCRI) Issues and Research Conference here in Boston today. Dr. Sommers, the Huntley Quelch Professor of Health Care Economics at…

I’ve been watching the robotics news with the kind of morbid fascination usually reserved for horror movies where you know the ending won’t be good but you can’t look away. The latest development? Researchers have taught a robot to learn 1,000 different physical tasks in a single day using just one demonstration per task. One day. One…

There’s something happening in America that hasn’t happened in a generation. We’re building things again. Or at least, we’re talking very seriously about building things again. Approximately 230,000–250,000 manufacturing jobs were announced for reshoring or foreign direct investment in recent years, according to the Reshoring Initiative. The CHIPS and Science Act is transitioning from funding announcements to…

It’s almost that time again. The time when some of the best and brightest minds in workers’ compensation converge on a frigid New England city to discuss the state of our beloved industry. Yes, the Workers Compensation Research Institute (WCRI) is once again hosting its annual Issues & Research Conference, this year running March 3-4,…

Those of you who have been reading this blog for any length of time know that I’m not shy about trumpeting accomplishments – mine, those of people I work with, or those of the broader industry when it gets something right. Today is one of those days. This week, January 12th and 13th, something historic…

There’s an old saw in the safety world that says the rules are written in blood. It’s a grim reminder that most workplace safety regulations exist because someone, somewhere, was hurt or killed doing something that now has a rule against it. Sometimes, though, we get a reminder that the blood continues to flow even…

Thirteen years ago, in 2012, I had what seemed to me at the time to be a fairly simple idea: What if we stopped calling this industry “workers’ compensation” and started calling it “Workers’ Recovery” instead? Now, before you dismiss this as merely semantic navel-gazing from an industry blogger with too much time on his hands, hear…

For the past seven months, I’ve been viewing the world through what I can only describe as several layers of industrial-grade Saran Wrap. My right eye, which had faithfully served me over numerous decades, decided last June that it had seen enough of my shenanigans and essentially went on strike. Two weeks ago, I had…

It is once again that time where I dust off my prognosticative pen, shake loose the cobwebs from my crystal ball, and pretend I have any idea what the coming year will bring. Regular readers of this blog, or anyone with a memory extending back more than twelve months, will recall that my predictive abilities…