News Coverage
Study Hits Insurers On Asbestos
Published March 8, 2004
WASHINGTON - More than 100,000 people will die of asbestos-related diseases in the next decade, and pending legislation on asbestos litigation reform does not even come close to providing adequate compensation, an environmental activist group contends.
The Washington-based Environmental Working Group also charges that insurers and manufacturers knew that asbestos exposure was killing workers but did nothing to prevent it.
"The current push by defendant industries to establish a national asbestos victims trust fund is driven in large part by the fact that courts consistently find asbestos companies guilty, not just of exposing their workers to a substance--asbestos--that could kill or severely injure them, but of doing this with full knowledge of the fatal consequences of their actions, and of actively concealing this truth from these same workers," the group's study charged.
Anne Sittmann, a representative of the Des Plaines, Ill.-based Property Casualty Insurers Association of America, said that it is important to note that the study was commissioned by the trial bar--the primary opponent to asbestos litigation reform in the country. "The study appears to be riddled with typical trial lawyer rhetoric--just another effort by the trial bar to derail legal reform," she said.
The study cites a variety of documents dating back many years which, it contends, demonstrate that insurers and manufacturers knew about the risks associated with asbestos for many years before it became public.
"These papers reveal a brazen disregard for the men and women who, by the 1960s, were dying by the thousands each year for these businesses--a history of abuse and deception that is unparalleled in American industrial history," the study said.