by Mike Hall, Apr 10, 2008

The Bush administration has continued to turn its back on the health and other needs of the first responders and rescue and recovery workers exposed to the toxic stew at Ground Zero. A study by doctors at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City finds nearly 70 percent of firefighters, police officers, emergency medical crews, construction workers, utility workers and volunteers have suffered lung and other health problems.

Bush’s most recent outrage came in his budget proposal, cutting health care funding for Sept. 11 first responders by 77 percent and in December when he canceled a health monitoring and treatment program for Ground Zero workers.

But the Bush administration isn’t the only group failing to reach out to 9/11 workers.

Last week, in a joint hearing, two House subcommittee hearings examined how a $1 billion fund Congress created nearly four years ago to compensate workers who become sick or injured working at Ground Zero has spent more on legal fees fighting claims than awards to workers.

The World Trade Captive Insurance Fund, administered by New York City, has made five awards totaling just  $300,000 but has spent $100 million in legal fees fighting the nearly 9,000 claims by workers who toiled on the rubble piles.

That fund is separate from the Victim Compensation program that distributed more than $7 billion to nearly 2,900 families of those killed in the Sept. 11 attack and to 2,500 people who were injured or became ill. But that fund ceased operation in December 2003 and many Ground Zero workers didn’t begin to show symptoms until later.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) said, “Congress has an obligation to ensure that the programs it has created to assist the victims of 9/11 function efficiently and effectively.”

These programs were created to compensate victims, not force them into torturous litigation.

Officials of the $1 billion fund say they are obligated to investigate and challenge each claim. But as former New York City police officer Michael Valentin—who was forced to retire after a series of Sept. 11-related ailments—pointed out:

My colleagues and the other men and women who are sick and out of work because of their time at Ground Zero don’t have years to wait. What they do have is mounting frustration, worsening illness and disability, bills and mortgages they can’t pay and medications they can’t afford.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), a co-sponsor of legislation addressing the health care needs of Sept. 11 workers, puts it this way:

The pain and suffering of living 9/11 victims is real and cannot be ignored….The federal government has a moral and legal obligation to compensate the living victims of 9/11, to provide for their health care and attempt to make them whole again for their subsequent financial losses.

Nadler, along with Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y) and Rep. Vito Fossella (R-N.Y.), has introduced H.R. 3543, the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2007.

The bill would create a permanent World Trade Center Health Program to provide monitoring, treatment and research to address the health effects of the Sept. 11 attacks. It is named after a New York police detective who died from the after-effects of responding to the disaster.

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