Workers' Comp for Battle Wounds

Imagine you're a civilian Army employee working in Iraq, riding alongside service members in your Humvee when it's hit by a roadside bomb. You receive initial treatment for your severe injuries, but then you're turned away from military hospitals for ongoing treatment. Instead, you're told to work through the Labor Department's Office of Workers' Compensation Programs, where you find out that your war wounds don't really match any of its bureaucratic workplace injury codes. You then embark on an odyssey of trying to find doctors in the civilian health care system with experience treating your injuries.

That's what happened to Mike Helms, a counterintelligence expert with the Army's 902nd Military Intelligence Group, the Washington Post reports today. Helms' description of his plight is heartbreaking:

"I did not have an 'accident' while working. I was subjected to an offensive attack by an enemy of the U.S. government who attempted to kill me. Why am I under workers' comp if workers' comp does not recognize a combat injury?"

Helms, of course, is hardly the first federal employee to run into roadblocks at OWCP. As Brian Friel reported in Government Executive in Sept. 2002:

Survivors of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, continue to deal with the workers' compensation office today. Many survivors report that dealing with OWCP has been a roller coaster ride: Responsive, competent claims examiners ease some interactions, while nonresponsive, incompetent examiners mar others.