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CELOTEX CORP. v. AUTEN12/20/1995
sability upon the employer; second, apportionment statutes, under which the employer pays only for the single member lost in his employment; and third, second injury funds, which ensure that the employee receives the full disability benefits but reimburses the employer for the difference between this sum and what he would pay under an apportionment statute.
Larson, § 59.10, at 10-492.329-.330.
The problem of apportionment of a compensable loss is encountered in three situations:
between successive employers or carriers, when the final disability is traceable to exposures or incidents under two or more of them; between an employer and a Second Injury Fund, when a preexisting condition covered by the Fund is involved; and between an employer and the employee himself, when a prior personal disability contributes to the final disability result.
Id. § 59.20, at 10-492.337-.339. In the first two situations, the employee is assured of full benefits from someone; the only question is who will pay. In the third situation, "the injured worker faces the possibility of having to bear a substantial portion of the final loss himself." Id. § 59.20, at 10-492.340.
The problem in the third situation does not arise in a majority of states because such states have no apportionment statutes covering successive work-related injuries. States having such apportionment statutes allow an employee with a prior disability to recover for subsequent disability only what the employee would have been entitled to for the latter disability considered alone. Id. § 59.21, at 10-492.340. As Larson notes, " he apparent harshness of this rule has been softened in most of the principle states having such statutes by an exception for cases coming within Second Injury Fund provisions." Id. § 59.21, at 10-492.357-.358. But, for example, in a state having both an apportionment statute and no Second Injury Fund, an employee losing a second eye will receive only the scheduled value of a single eye. Id. § 59.21, at 10-492.359. In this example the employee, rather than the employer, bears a substantial portion of the final loss.
According to Larson, courts "have generally tempered the harshness of apportionment statutes whenever a doubt could be resolved in the direction of constricting their scope." Id. Even where states have no apportionment statutes, courts have tried to limit the impact of apportionment on employees:
Apart from special statute, apportionable "disability" does not include a prior nondisabling defect or disease that contributes to the end result. Nothing is better established in compensation law than the rule that, when industrial injury precipitates disability from a latent prior condition, such as heart disease, cancer, back weakness and the like, the entire disability is compensable. . . .
The essential distinction at stake here is between a preexisting disability that independently produces all or part of the final disability, and a preexisting condition that in some way combines with or is acted upon by the industrial injury .
Id. § 59.22(a), at 10-492.361; § 59.22(b), at 10-492.389. See Rose v. John Deere Ottumwa Works, 247 Iowa 900, 908, 76 N.W.2d 756, 760-61 (1956) (although Iowa workers' compensation law allows no compensation for results of preexisting condition, claimant is to be compensated for disability resulting from aggravation of preexisting condition because of work-related injury ).
In Varied Enterprises, Inc., we relied on the above quote from Larson in formulating our apportionment rule that limits apportionment to
those situations where a prior injury or illness, unrelated to
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