Today the Oregon Department of Consumer and Business Services released the full 2012 Workers’ Compensation Premium Rate Ranking Study. (A summary was released in October.) The study is done every two years and ranks Oregon’s workers’ comp premium rates against those in other states.

We have described the problems with using the Oregon study as a measure of Washington’s workers’ comp costs many times. It is tailored to Oregon’s industry mix, for example. Also, as the study notes,

For Washington, hourly rates had to be converted to payroll rates. The Washington payroll data included overtime pay that may overstate the average wage for purposes of premium computation, thus understating the effective average payroll rate.

See this blog post for a full accounting of our concerns about the study (and more).

As we have written, supporters of Washington’s workers’ comp system used to point to the Oregon study as proof that Washington’s system has high benefits and low costs. That would be hard to do with a straight face now: Washington had the nation’s 13th highest premium rates in 2012, up from 26th in 2010 and 38th in 2008.

This significant jump in the rankings comes despite the fact that over this time L&I has been holding down premium rates (adopting lower rates than indicated):