Earlier this week, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee started what by all indications will be a lengthy mark-up of legislation to create a $140 billion trust fund for victims of asbestos-related diseases.

S. 852, the so-called Fairness in Asbestos Injury Resolution Act of 2005, would finance the trust fund with contributions from companies (and their insurers) that knowingly exposed workers and their families to this powerful human carcinogen. Claimants would have to meet stringent medical criteria to qualify for compensation; those who do not are forever foreclosed from filing a legal claim for asbestos-related injuries in state or federal court. 

Public Citizen strongly opposes S. 852 for numerous reasons. Among them is that the bill creates unreasonable and scientifically unjustified diagnostic barriers that will prevent hundreds of thousands of legitimate victims of asbestos poisoning from receiving compensation.

Further, the bill has become an outlandish giveaway to a small group of companies – including Dow Chemical, Ford, General Electric, General Motors, Honeywell, Pfizer, Viacom and at least 10 asbestos makers that have filed for bankruptcy – that lobbied for and won relief from their liability worth tens of billions of dollars.

Some of the nation’s largest financial investment firms, meanwhile, will score big rewards should the legislation pass. The success of these businesses in protecting their interests will sharply reduce the funds that will be available to asbestos victims.

We urge you to editorialize against passage of S. 852. In addition to its unwarranted windfall for companies, the bill will cut off the rights of victims of asbestos exposure – leaving them injured, uncompensated and uninsurable  – and will shift the significant social and economic costs of this catastrophe to taxpayers.

A detailed Public Citizen report, chronicling the corporate winners who succeeded in protecting their financial interests in the asbestos bill, is available online at: www.citizen.org/asbestos. Also available online at www.citizen.org/congress/medical is a Public Citizen background paper that details the unjustifiable medical hurdles the bill erects for victims seeking compensation.

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Public Citizen is a national, nonprofit consumer advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C.

Web site http://www.citizen.org

 *** POSTED MAY 16, 2005 ***