This Indiana Court of Appeals decision, along with a recent Oregon court ruling, could make employers reconsider hiring workers with health conditions that might cost their companies thousands of dollars as time goes on.
Boston's The Gourmet Pizza must pay for lap-band surgery for Adam Childers, a cook at the pizza place , under last month's Indiana ruling that upheld a 4-3 decision by the state's workers' compensation board.
Childers, who was then 25, weighing in at 340 pounds in March 2007 when he was accidentally hit in the back by a freezer door. Doctors said he needed surgery to ease his severe pain, but that the operation would be pointless unless he first had surgery to reduce his weight, which ballooned to 380 pounds after the accident.
His employers agreed to pay for the back surgery, but paying for a $25,000 weight-loss operation was unfair because Childers already was obese before he was hurt.
The board and the court, however, said the surgery — and disability payments while Childers was unable to work — were covered because his weight and the accident had combined to create a single injury. They said Boston's didn't present any evidence that his weight had been a medical problem before the accident.
The Oregon case we mentioned earlier, where the state's Supreme Court ruled Aug. 27 that the state workers' compensation insurance must pay for gastric bypass surgery to ensure that a man's knee replacement surgery was effective.
But it's this Indiana case which experts say could have a chilling effect on business.
The ruling will likely make employers afraid of hiring people who are overweight or have other conditions that might expose them to workplace injury.
So while legally, you cannot refuse employment to a 350-pound person because they're 350 pounds, that's against the law. But there are always other reasons not to hire them.
The biggest loser?
Boston's The Gourmet Pizza?
Adam Childers?
Employers and or future employees?
