134
Opinion of the Court
extent of the worker's disability (and his consequent entitlement to compensation) in toto based on all relevant factors, including the future effects of the disability. See Brief for Petitioner 9. What we have already said, however, shows the unsoundness of Metropolitan's two options.
The practical effect of denying any compensation to a disabled claimant on the ground that he is presently able to earn as much as (or more than) before his injury would run afoul of the Act's mandate to account for the future effects of disability in fashioning an award, since those effects would not be reflected in the current award and the 1-year statute of limitations for modification after denial of compensation would foreclose responding to such effects on a wait-andsee basis as they might arise.6 On the other hand, trying to honor that mandate by basing a present award on a comprehensive prediction of an inherently uncertain future would, as we have seen, almost always result in present overcompensation or undercompensation. And it would be passing strange to credit Congress with the intent to guarantee fairness to employers and employees by a wait-and-see approach in most cases where future effects are imperfectly foreseeable, but to find no such intent in one class of cases, those in which wage-earning ability does not immediately decline.7
6 The one possible escape from this conclusion rests on an implausible reading of the Act. A claimant could, arguably, preserve a right to compensation in the future by reapplying within the 1-year period and successively each year thereafter. See § 22, 33 U. S. C. § 922 (permitting modification "at any time prior to one year after the rejection of a claim"). But this would be a strange way to administer the Act, for its very premise is that a claimant would repeatedly file reapplications knowing his disability to be without present effect and (on Metropolitan's theory) himself without any good-faith claim to the present compensation sought.
7 The legislative history to the 1938 amendments to the Act, which added § 8(h), indicates that Congress understood that the reference to future effects in the new subsection would interact with § 22 by allowing compensation for permanent partial disability for employees whose job opportunities are narrowed by injury but whose wages have not declined:
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