The Kansas Court of Appeals ruled on October 23, 2026 in Suarez-Cirino v. Menard, Inc. that Menard moved too soon to permanently terminate a worker’s future medical benefits. A judge formally awarded Betzaida Suarez-Cirino future medical benefits for a shoulder injury in September 2022, even though she had not received authorized treatment since July 2017. Menard filed to terminate those benefits in February 2024, 17 months after the award, citing the absence of treatment under K.S.A. 44-510k’s two-year non-treatment presumption. Before the Workers Compensation Appeals Board ruled on Menard’s application, Suarez-Cirino saw a doctor who found she still needed care, and she applied for authorized treatment in July 2024.
The appeals court held that where no treatment has occurred since before the award itself, the two-year clock is measured from the award date, not from whatever earlier date treatment last happened. Seventeen months was seven months short.
Who it affects
Kansas self-insured employers and their third-party administrators (TPAs) carrying open future-medical awards, particularly construction, retail, and manufacturing employers with older claims where authorized treatment lapsed years before a formal award was entered. Anyone who closed a Kansas future-medical file by counting two years from the claimant’s last treatment date, rather than from the award date, now has exposure.
The reserve mechanism
This is a case-reserve finality and tail-length problem. A future-medical award that was closed and taken as a reserve release can be reopened, forcing the case reserve back onto the books and re-aging the claim’s position in the development triangle. Worse, the court made clear the clock restarts every time authorized treatment resumes after an award, so a file can cycle between “closed” and “open” indefinitely as long as a claimant keeps seeking authorized care. That is the opposite direction from California’s recent WC deadline ruling, which used a strict filing deadline to speed reserve finality. In Kansas, finality just got harder to reach, not easier.
What this means for your next review
Kansas self-insureds should ask their TPA to pull every future-medical file closed under the two-year presumption and confirm whether the clock was measured from the award date or the last-treatment date. Any file closed on a timeline shorter than 24 months from the award is now vulnerable to reopening, and the reserve release taken on that closure may need to be reversed. Flag TPA claim-closing protocols that key off “date of injury” or “date of last treatment” instead of “date of award” as the specific audit target; that is the data field most likely to produce a quiet reserve miss. See the case reserve strengthening and workers’ compensation IBNR guides for how reopened files should flow back into reserve estimates.