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As medical bills mount, who pays?

Neither the contractor nor subcontractor has provided workers' comp information.

By ROBIN STEIN
Published March 10, 2006

[Times photo: Kathleen Flynn]

Alfonso Escobar sits in his makeshift bedroom, part of a garage at a friend's home in Tampa.

TAMPA - Free falling three stories through the empty elevator shaft, a single, overwhelming thought echoed in Alfonso Escobar's head:

"That's it, I'm history."

The 49-year-old drywall hanger survived his first morning on a new construction job only to find himself in a waking nightmare.

Four surgeries and five weeks later, his fractured hip, thigh and lower leg are welded together with steel rods and plates.

Since his discharge from St. Joseph's Hospital, he spends all day and all night confined to a mattress stuffed into a friend's garage in Tampa. Stretched out amid a tangle of urine-stained blankets, he gently rotates his leg, rations his pain pills and watches his bills mount.

He is convinced the people who hired him to work at the Tarpon Springs construction project have abandoned their legal obligations to him.

Escobar is one of 80,000 Floridians injured on the job each year. Medical expenses and a percentage of lost wages are typically paid by employers' workers' compensation insurance carriers.

But neither Cantel Homes, the general contractor on the Sunset Bay townhome development where Escobar fell, nor the subcontractor, Security Drywall II, have acknowledged hiring Escobar or provided workers' compensation insurance policy information to his medical providers.

So the invoices are going to Escobar.

The two companies did not return multiple phone calls from the St. Petersburg Times.

In the margins of a Spanish cowboy novella, Escobar scribbles phone numbers of friends, lawyers, the food stamp office, anyone who might be able to help stem the flood of medical bills that already total more than $158,000.

Of the $300 he saved in recent months, Escobar says he has $20.25 left. If it were not for his friend Umberto Hurdado and his family, he believes he would be on the street.

Escobar, a Mexican national who has been a legal resident of the United States since 1998, says he sends about $500 a month to his wife and daughter in Mexico, who he has not seen in more than a decade.

They don't know about his fall because he does not want them to worry, he said. He is focused on recuperating so he can return to work and start paying off his bills.

"I am nervous about how I am going to pay," he said. "I'm getting new bills every day."

Lisa Patterson, a spokeswoman for St. Joeseph's Hospital, said Escobar has not been charged yet for the $136,000 due for his two-week hospital stay. The billing department is still working on tracking down his employer, she said.

Escobar said he was hired by Security Drywall II. One of its employees, Lydia Crespo, accompanied him to the hospital.

Crespo, identified in the police report as the construction crew leader who brought Escobar to the site, declined to be interviewed.

Douglas W. Matthews, owner of Cantel Homes, told police that construction of the luxury townhome development was behind schedule, adding: "Lydia must have been showing (Escobar) around to bring in another drywall crew to assist."

The report also said the elevator shaft into which Escobar fell had no warning signs or guards, as required by federal law.

"I know I need help," Escobar says,"but I don't know what kind of help I need. I have never been in this circumstance before. I've worked here for 25 years, I have never been hurt before."

John Brooks, an Orlando lawyer who has specialized in workers' compensation law for 30 years, said Escobar is not the only casualty of the residential building boom.

"This happens all the time," said Brooks, who also served as a judge and insurance company representative. "They . . . deny that he was an employee, that they ever saw him before. There's not going to be any payroll stub, and now it becomes a matter or proof."

Employer policies cover all employees, defined by state statute as any person "engaged in any employment under any appointment or contract . . . express or implied, oral or written, whether lawfully or unlawfully employed."

The construction industry has been a longtime problem for state regulators, Brooks said.

But the state Legislature has cracked down in recent years, he said, forcing general contractors to provide coverage for subcontractors who skirt the rules.

"With 71 investigators for the entire state, you are not going to get to every work site each year," said Tanner Holloman, director of the Florida Workers' Compensation Division. "We rely on referrals. We get tons of referrals. And if we find out they failed to file a report of injury, we generate a stop-work order."

When workers' compensation investigators find an employer is operating without coverage, they can shut down a work site, require employers to pay back premiums and impose hefty penalties, Holloman said. The most egregious cases of flagrant or repeat offenders may be referred to the insurance fraud division, which can file criminal charges.

Last year, state investigators issued 2,672 stop-work orders and levied $46-million in fines. Among those targeted in 2005 were 49 employers in Pinellas County, where Escobar's accident occurred, a decrease from the 54 citations issued here in 2004.

Andrew Sabolic, acting chief of the Workers' Compensation Bureau of Compliance, said his agency has not taken any enforcement actions against Cantel Homes or Security Drywall II. While records show Cantel Homes has a current workers' compensation insurance policy, Security Drywall lacks coverage, he said, but might have an arrangement with an employee leasing firm.

Brooks and Holloman said Escobar could file a claim with a lawyer or personnel from the Workers' Compensation Division's Employee Assistance Office but needs to act quickly to avoid missing filing deadlines.

The urgency isn't lost on Escobar. He has only three pain pills left.

[Last modified March 10, 2006, 08:04:05]