“THE RULE IS BEYOND THEIR CAPABILITY OF BEING ABLE TO ENFORCE IT. THE CARRIER AND THE DRIVER ARE STILL TRYING TO COMPLY WITH IT, WHILE THE STATES AND THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ARE GETTING CAUGHT UP.”
— DAVID SAUNDERS, PRESIDENT OF WORKFORCE QA
paperwork could have their CDLs revoked or downgraded from interstate to intrastate status, affecting their abil- ity to work. Problems have cropped up because
states haven’t been able to keep up with the change, Saunders said. States have had to beef up their staffing to be able to manually enter the medical cards into the federal system, but haven’t gotten any extra funding to pay for it, he said. “The rule is beyond their capabil-
ity of being able to enforce it,” he said. “The carrier and the driver are still try- ing to comply with it, while the states and the federal government are getting caught up.” Because of the problems maintain-
ing the registry — and because drivers have to re-self-certify every time they have a physical, even if their medical card is still current — Saunders has begun suggesting that carriers change a longstanding practice. Instead of requiring all new hires to pass a medi- cal exam, Saunders said, carriers should consider accepting a driver’s existing medical card if it’s based on a physical conducted within a certain amount of time before the date of hire. Saunders doesn’t, however, tell carriers exactly what that time limit should be. The risk, he said, is that a driver
might have developed a disqualifying medical condition in the time since the most recent physical, and if that driver is involved in a wreck, the carrier might be at risk of being held liable — even though the driver had a valid medical card.
“Carriers should establish with
[their] attorneys and risk management at what point they would say a driver needs a new physical,” he said.
20 David O’Neal, director of safety
services for the Arkansas Trucking Association, added an additional con- cern. “It’s not just the time since the last physical, it’s the gap between jobs that concerns me. Bad habits may have been picked up, or a driver might have suffered an otherwise undetectable injury that impacts his or her ability to safely drive a CMV.” For carriers considering the
approach outlined by Saunders, O’Neal suggested that both periods of time be addressed, based on the company’s tol- erance for risk. “I believe you have to have safeguards both for the period of time since the last physical, and another for the period of time since the driver left his or her last employer. “Carriers have these best practices
in place to minimize the risk of bring- ing on an unhealthy or unsafe driver,” O’Neal concluded. “As frustrating as the medical exam regulations are, I would think long and hard before relax- ing my standards.”
CLOSING LOOPHOLES AND SAVING MONEY Accepting a driver’s existing, still-
valid medical card means carriers would save the cost of paying for a physical for every new hire. Physicals are becoming a bigger expense for carriers, Saunders said, because the trucking industry has such a high turnover rate and the cost of physicals can run between $70 and $140. “Why would you want to pay for
another physical if the driver already went through qualification with a prior fleet?” Saunders asked. Drivers, on the other hand, need
to take special care to make sure they update their medical card with the
state DMV when they renew their CDL and every time they get a new card, Saunders said. Because CDLs are valid for six years and medical cards are valid for only two years at the most, it can be easy to forget about updating medical card information while the CDL is still good, he said. Formerly, trucking companies were
responsible for tracking the medical cards. States now fulfill that function, and if the state doesn’t have a copy of a driver’s medical card, it will downgrade or suspend the driver’s CDL. In Texas, about 165,000 truck drivers were noti- fied that their CDLs were suspended because they didn’t submit medical cards to the state DMV. Rules vary by state, but in
Arkansas, if a driver doesn’t submit a valid medical card, his or her CDL sta- tus is changed to “not certified.” After 60 days, the driver will lose all CDL privileges, and a year after that, the driver must retest to obtain a new CDL. The new registry isn’t perfect,
Saunders said, and requiring all driv- ers to have valid medical cards doesn’t automatically equate to fewer fatal crashes on the road. It does, however, close loopholes and eliminate the temp- tation for drivers to falsify a medical card.
“Before, you might have a card that
validated you had an exam with a doc- tor, but it didn’t validate that the doc- tor was certified,” Saunders said. “You could have gotten it from your Aunt Bessy or at the nearest truck stop.” The majority of the trucking industry wants to go to an electronic system for medi- cal cards, Saunders said, even if the pro- cess of getting there is proving messy. “It takes the ability away from the driver to skirt the law,” he said. ATR
ARKANSAS TRUCKING REPORT | Issue 5 2015
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