TOWER — When Pam Wettering was injured in a March 2 fall while cross-country skiing, she knew she was facing surgery and a long recovery. What she didn’t expect was that the financial safety net meant to support her during that time would leave her without any income at all.
Wettering, who works at Minntac, did what she was supposed to do. The day after her injury, she contacted her employer’s human resources department and applied for short-term disability through Sedgwick, which is the third-party administrator of benefits for U.S. Steel. She also applied for Minnesota’s new Paid Leave program, which launched Jan. 1 and is designed to provide partial wage replacement for workers dealing with medical issues or family leave.
The short-term disability claim was approved within days. The state application was expected to be processed within a week to 10 days.
More than a month later, she is still waiting, with no income coming in while the state’s delay also holds up her employer’s short-term disability benefit. With bills coming due and no clear answers, she has turned to repeated phone calls to the state, trying to find out what is holding up her case.
“They (Sedgwick) won’t pay me anything because they’re waiting to see how much the state is going to pay me,” she said. “I basically just call the state all the time, and I get a different person each time.”
There is no single caseworker assigned to her claim, meaning each call begins with a new person reviewing her file. She has also struggled to confirm whether the documentation she submitted has been received through the state’s online portal.
“On my end, it doesn’t show,” she said. “They say they got it, but on my end it says nothing’s there.”
While staff have told her they can see her documentation, the portal continues to show that nothing has been received.
At the same time, the timeline for a decision has kept shifting. What began as a one- to two-week estimate has stretched into several weeks, and now, she said, state representatives can no longer provide any estimate at all.
“They don’t even have any idea now,” she said.
Before the state’s Paid Leave program took effect, Wettering would have been able to receive partial income through her employer’s short-term disability plan. Now, because that plan must coordinate with the state program, she cannot receive those benefits until the state determines her benefit amount.
The result is a gap that neither program is filling.
Wettering said she is relying on savings to cover basic expenses, with larger bills like property taxes and insurance coming due soon. The financial strain has added another layer of stress to an already difficult recovery.
“You don’t need the stress,” she said. “It’s stressful enough when the accident happened, and then going through the surgery and this and that, and then I have to worry about where the money’s going to come from.”
Her experience is not unique.
In recent weeks, media reports across Minnesota have documented delays in processing Paid Leave claims as the new system handles a high volume of applications. Online discussions and social media posts have echoed similar frustrations, with applicants reporting long waits, inconsistent communication, and confusion over documentation.
Wettering pointed to a coworker at Minntac who has faced an even longer delay.
“She was off for three months,” Wettering said. “She had late fees coming in. She had to get a loan just to make ends meet. She’s back at work now and still hasn’t seen a payment. It’s still in review.”
That case underscores a key concern with the current system, that even when benefits are eventually approved and paid in a lump sum, the delay itself can create immediate financial hardship.
“A lump sum doesn’t do anybody any good when the income is needed now,” Wettering said.
The Paid Leave program was designed to provide a financial bridge during times when workers cannot earn a paycheck. But in cases like Wettering’s, the coordination between the state and employer-based benefits has instead created a bottleneck.
For Wettering, the process has been a sharp departure from what she expected when she first applied.
“We have two options for income that are supposed to protect a person,” she said. “And it’s doing the exact opposite. It started out good, and then it just became a nightmare.”