The Texas Department of Insurance (TDI) released biennial reports to the Texas Legislature, looking at the impact of the 2005 House Bill7 reforms on affordability and availability of workers’ comp insurance for Texasemployers, and the impact of certified workers’ comp health  care networks on return-to-work outcomes, medical costs, access and utilization of health care, injured employee satisfaction, health-related outcomes, complaints, and medical dispute resolution.

Some of their major findings are that comp insurance has been profitable every year since 2004, and since 2003 rates decreased almost 64 percent through 2017. The number of employers participating in networks, and the number of employees treated by those networks has increased. About 50 percent of new claims are treated in networks, in 2010 it was around 20 percent. In 2017 there were 29 active certified networks covering all 254 counties in Texas.

There was a decreasing trend of non-subscribing employers from 2004 to 2016 (38 percent to 22 percent). In 2018 however, the number of employers who opted out of workers’ comp insurance increased to 28 percent. Those employers employ 18 percent of the private workforce in the state. The non-subscriber rate is still one of the lowest since the survey began in 1993.

The number of physicians treating workers’ compensation injured employees increased by 4 percent between 2005 and 2017, and the number of claims decreased by 20 percent in that time. The average number of injured employees per participating physician decreased from 19.4 in 2005 to 14.8 in 2017.

The number of medical disputes decreased from over 13,000 in 2005 to under 5,000 in 2017, almost a 63 percent decrease.

Read the full reports here and here.