DOT physical price and DOT ClearingHouse registration

According to the information we're getting...take it for what it's worth... one thing that they'll be looking at carefully is a history of opioid use.
Pain patients, and former pain patients will have to document the extent and reason for continued use. I imagine that will entail a lot of paperwork for the doctors and the applicant.
On another topic, the insurance companies, as usual, will be investigating and setting strict guidelines for people who have been off work for any length of time and were enrolled as a pain patient or claimed a disability that prohibited them from working.. They're also going to want documentation about the conditions that prompted the disability that led to the time off.
I don't have all the answers but I do have a pretty good source of information. They can't tell me everything they know but from what I've been told things don't look good.
I'd say that your chances of you ever driving again are slim to none.
You'll either get disqualified by the Feds or you'll get hammered by the insurance companies.
The doctor that I got this information from has stopped doing DOT and FAA physicals entirely. She said that the BS isn't worth the revenue.

 

I thought I had just read independents don't have to take any action as far as the clearinghouse is concerned. IF you decide to register, you'll need to do so as both a company and also as a driver.

 

I am not sure, but I remember reading something that said independent owner-ops need to register as a company and as a driver.

 

Drug clearinghouse looming, owner-operators express frustration, lack of awareness


Here is the article I read.


I just spoke to the lady that manages the local consortium that I am a member of. She said I needed to register and put them in as my T.P.A.

I really haven't paid much attention to this until now. Just thought maybe some members on here had registered already.

 

I stand corrected, it was lease operators like myself that aren't necessarily required to do anything.

 

edited. The copy function failed. I will rewrite the response formally today or tomorrow in a condensed form.

Essentially the only way a Company Insurance can gain infroamtion from the PMB is if they have access to a Friendly Company Doctor who will take a minute to pull up a prospective applicant under SSN, Name, address etc to CHECK that person's Narcotics prescribing history. The doctor says yes to the insurance person that yes this one was a pain patient.

If the company is told not to hire pain patients history applicants then there is nothing to be done. If you looked far and wide there will be someone who will hire provided I have no active medicine history. Thats the key. I don't require exemption letters for medicine, I don't require medicine to drive a 18 wheeler and so on. There is no problem unless the insurance types want to make it (*And they will) a problem.

There is a pending database to be built from 2020 to 2023 which will include a driver's active medicines in some cases narcotics with a waiver so he or she can continue driving a 18 wheeler with pain medicine inside of them. Essentially committing DUI at a low level it's still DUI. But the letter provided to them is a loophole and a defense to prosecution.

FMCSA already in my past decided that I qualify with hearing aids to drive around the USA and into Canada with 18 wheeler under the then Class A. What FMCSA did TELL ME was this.

ANY Company hiring truckers who decide to EXCLUDE ANY TRUCKER requiring hearing aids to be more stricter than DOT limits on hearing is LEGALLY ALLOWED TO DO THAT. This was back when 1996 was the year I dealt with Covenant with a failed orientaiton when they decided to kick me out and send me home. They keep a database similar to DAC privately among the 15 or so trucking companies as a COOPERATIVE effort to work around DAC's mandated 10 year erase law. So when you or anyone does a deep enough records check against my history in trucking Covenant is the only one left standing. Everything else is literally a blank with two exceptions. Maryland and Arkansas does say that I have held a Commercial A or CDL A license from date and year to that date and year in each state. So I can prove 31 years holding a CDL until 2014. When its time for me to go get a CDL A again Arkansas says no problem you are grandfathered to go back and get it with a road test and revelant written exams and so on. Even a long form DOT exam. (That will be the next item we will address into 2020.)

I have two more operations coming up and those are outpatient and does not affect overall DOT medical requirements anyway. A form of maintenance work that needs to be done. The heart itself has proven to the Nth degree not to be in failure or any kind of issues requiring surgery or medicine. Its a battleship. So we got that out of the way this year and opened up two other possibilities to fix purely by accident. Each of those will improve my quality of life.

I can go on. But if trucking companies exclude by insurance orders enough drivers who qualified but otherwise show a PMB history then we have a problem in this industry that will become a BIG problem in it's own time. Theoratically if I hold a DOT medical a valid CDL A and so on so forth and have NO CURRENT HISTORY as of 2020 pain medicine filling under PMB as evidence as such I can probably sue and get a nice check from a employer who chose to exclude me under something that does not exist. Fears of narcotic use or whatever. The company drug test will show clear hair, blood, urine etc it makes no difference to me its going to be clean.

As far as CBD in Arkansas, Ive been told that it does not matter to the Revenuer if I use it when driving anything. Including big rigs. There is nothing that prevents that from being used freely and openly. At the moment however my last contact with CBD is back in July of this year when I was introduced to it to take care of a palsy thats not even part of DOT medical. Any THC in it at all even a molecule of it would have been out of my system long before now. So that's one concerned that not even a concern.

The next problem is again focusing on Insurance people. By law they cannot access PMB data. However any doctor, including and espeically DOT related company doctors WILL check that PMB against me in name, SSN and address. The only other party able to access that PMB is Law Enforcement. And they can do that with a warrant in some cases that does not allow already a PC search of that database anyway. For example I got pulled over with a prescription bottle, correct count of pills and so on. The first assumption would be DUI. The second would be to test at the station or hospital a panel of common DUI drugs about 5 or 7 of them if I remember right. if its clean then there is no DUI. If its dirty then yes the vehicle is owned by the state now and I get to have mandatory fines in excess of 10K to start with and be prosecuted for it. Once the trucking company found out about THAT there is no hiring me period. for anything.

You will have to have very small time family one or three truck farm type operations to be regulating that far down to check applications like the Big time OTR companies do today. Until then, you can join a small family outfit and run trucking in the same old way because its a workaround against those who make sure as insurance types to exclude from the bigger OTR sweat shops anyway. I believe that kind fo regulating is coming within the 2020 and 2023 pending rules requiing the Driver. Thats me to fill out and submit to the Government information on any drug use such as pain medicine. Since there is no use it does not exist and there is nothing applied to nothing at all Unless you went back 2019 and beyond towards 2010. you will find a very consistent flow of information in the records at that point. And no trucking job was held after 2010 anyway even though I was grandfathered until 2014 when I physically turned in the CDL.

I can go on but think I went far enough. if it does become fact that insurance excludes me from lawful OTR trucking companies based on past history not availible to them unless provided by the company doctor then we will have to meet at the courthouse (The trucking company vs me) and decide whats what. Either a settlement, dismissal or back hire to applciation date refusal and hire me anyway because there is nothing of nothing preventing me otherwise from doing that work legally.

It is not good to have what I would call a Shadow Decision making by the Insurance people above a trucking company. That has been going on a very long time and it would have to be at the point at which if a applicant wants to work for a company, he or she will have to pay the difference against otherwise normal applications in premiums to that company for the right to work there. I don't know enough about that realm of the law as pertains to employers. I know that they cannot ask certain questions or take certain history beyond 10 years and especially cannot take black listed data (Controlled by each state making own law on this. IN Indiana for example a employer who BL someone can say so verbally by phone to a another employer looking at your application but not legal for that employer to write the words blacklsited in writing.) Since its been much more than 10 years that particular episode no longer applies to me. So it becomes possible to run steel and alumium again in the midwest. By example.

As such a person's past medicine history does not get to decide a employablity for that person or not. You cannot say because I have a history of medicines and be exlcuded when you accept a employee based on a loophole letter from his prescribing doc saying he can have these medicines while driving. The employer has no problem, the government has no problem until we have a accident based on DUI or some other cause by too much medicine in a short time. As happened before many times. Its a double standard.

I can go on but I think enough here for one day. It would not surprise at all based on the principle of the whole situation. I get clean, I get healthy enough to discard disability possibly and go to work trucking. Only to see trucking exclude me? Why do I even bother? Might as well go back to the clinic and get a gazillion pills for next month and give a #### to the industry at all.

No I am not that way. Its the principle. Otherwise qualifed (As a newbie etc) there is no problem unless something is made into a problem Thats for the Court to settle. Make a better living at the court house going after employers who say no.

 

If that's 'edited', I'd hate to see the long version

 

I registered as a motor carrier, but when I try to register as a driver it takes me right back to the motor carrier page. Have you had any luck registering as both?

 

I just registered this morning. It is somewhat confusing. "it is the government after all". It doesn't work like the downloadable instructions say it will, at least it didn't for me.

I think I am registered as both, best I can tell. When I log into the Clearinghouse home page there is a little drop down window that lets me switch from driver to Admin, so as far as I can tell I am registered as both.

Do you have that ability from the home page?

 

I finally figured that part out. I still haven’t figured out how to designate the consortium.