Bipartisan proposal ensures payments for hundreds of thousands of victims
Marin Independent Journal, Greg Gordon
Published April 20, 2005
WASHINGTON - A bipartisan group of senators rolled out a massive bill
yesterday to settle 300,000 pending asbestos injury claims and compensate victims over the next 30 years through a $140 billion, industry-bankrolled trust fund.
Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the 301-page bill "fairly and equitably tackles an enormous problem in America."
Specter said estimates put the future cost of the nation's worst workplace health calamity at $117 billion, leaving a "cushion" if casualties run higher. An estimated 27.2 million American workers breathed asbestos dust, and experts predict that as many as 2 million more victims will seek compensation on top of 600,000 whose claims have been resolved.
The compromise bill would compensate thousands of disease victims who now collect little or nothing on their claims because of the bankruptcies of 74 defendant companies, he said. A provision crafted by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., would expedite compensation for terminally ill asbestos victims, allowing them to go back to court if they are not compensated within nine months. Laws in California and several other states move those victims to the top of court dockets.
The bill also would cover victims of community asbestos exposures, such as those in Eldorado Hills, where naturally occurring asbestos was unearthed by home builders near a high school and running track, Feinstein and Specter said.
"I think there is going to be very, very broad support," said Specter, who has worked on the complex bill while his hairline thins from chemotherapy treatments for lymphoma diagnosed earlier this year.
He was joined at a news conference by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the panel's ranking member, Feinstein and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who tried to win passage of an earlier trust fund bill while committee chairman in 2003.
"I believe we'll get it passed ... with a very comfortable margin," Leahy
said.
The Specter-Leahy deal culminated more than two years of negotiations among defendant companies, insurers, labor unions and trial lawyers, followed by intense bargaining in the Senate.
It still faces tall hurdles. It drew opposition last week from insurers and several victims' groups, including one led by Susan Vento, the widow of the late Minnesota congressman Bruce Vento. Bruce Vento died in 2000 of the fast-moving, asbestos-related cancer mesothelioma.
Asbestos plaintiffs attorneys, who would all but lose their franchise under the legislation, have launched multifaceted lobbying efforts to try to kill the bill. The Environmental Working Group, which acknowledges receiving funding from trial lawyers, issued a study projecting 33,000 mesothelioma deaths after the bill expires in around 2035.
Meantime, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said he and four other conservative Republicans on the committee "can't support the bill as it's currently written" because it fails to ensure "that sick people are paid" and others are not.
He also complained about unfair allocations among defendant companies that will be required to bankroll the fund with annual payments.
"I don't think it's fair to use the heavy hand of the federal government" to require such payments "unless we have confidence that it is a fair allocation of responsibility," Cornyn said.
