Workers’ compensation rates are creeping up again, and even before outgoing California Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner rejected steep proposed hike, some small businesses in the Tri-Counties ditched commercial insurance altogether and went the self-insurance route.

Poizner’s Nov. 20 rejection of the Workers’ Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau’s request to increase the basic workers’ comp rate by 27.2 percent was the third straight time the commissioner has done so. But his denial of the rate hike, full-throated as it may be, is merely advisory, since he lacks the authority to actually set workers’ comp rates.

The State Compensation Insurance Fund, California’s largest workers’ comp insurer, has already announced that it will raise its overall rates 5.2 percent at the beginning of 2011.

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