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Workers' Safety And Comp. Div. v. Bruhn12/24/1997
asis added.) The hearing examiner determined that, if the legislature had intended for the work related injury to be the sole or primary cause of an employee's death, it would have included those words in the statute. He concluded that, since the statute does not contain words to that effect, the legislature must have intended for death to be compensable as long as the death can be linked to the injury.
We disagree with the hearing examiner's interpretation of the statute. We read the statute to say that, in order for death to be compensable, the initial injury must be the direct cause of the employee's death. If the legislature had intended for a broader causation test to be applied, it would have defined what that test is instead of leaving it up to us to decipher.
he purpose of the workmen's compensation laws is to spread the risk of injury inherent in a job , over the whole industry so that the cost of medical attention and loss of wages will be passed on by inclusion in the price of the product or service being sold by the employer, instead of having to be borne by the unfortunate individual who suffers the injury.
Whitington v. Industrial Commission, 105 Ariz. 567, 468 P.2d 926, 928 (1970).
As the division points out, it would be impossible to ever cut off compensability if we were to adopt the hearing examiner's interpretation of the causation requirement. Would we compensate an employee who wrecked her car and died because she fell asleep at the wheel while she was on her way to see her doctor? Would we compensate an employee who was killed by a drunk driver while she was on her way home from her doctor's appointment? A logical end would not exist to the causation test which the hearing examiner proposes. Furthermore, it would lead to too many abuses, and the worker's compensation fund would, in effect, become a general health and accident insurance fund, a purpose for which it was not intended.
A causal connection does not exist between the employee's initial injury and her car accident. The fact that she was returning from a doctor's appointment for an injury which she sustained while she was working at the Pamida Discount Store does not translate to a finding that the injury caused her death. Certainly, the accident which caused the employee's death did not occur because of her work related back injury. The accident was not a hazard of her employment that she would not have been subjected to apart from her job nor did it result from a risk reasonably incident to the character of the business. Rather, the accident resulted from a hazard that we are all equally exposed to — bad road conditions. Accordingly, we conclude that the hearing examiner's award of worker's compensation death benefits to the survivors of the employee was not in accordance with the Wyoming Worker's Compensation Act.
The hearing examiner's decision is reversed.
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