Some of the 10,500 Ground Zero rescue and recovery workers who received a $712.5 million settlement to cover health care costs are still bitter. The money will be allocated according to not only severity of illness, but also possibility of being able to prove a causal relationship between exposure and disease — so plaintiffs with asthma will receive greater compensation than those with cancer, because it would have been easier to prove a causal link between at least worsened asthma and exposure at Ground Zero.
“Any cohort of 10,000 people followed closely over ten years will develop new cases of cancer. But there’s no reason to believe their work at Ground Zero was causally related to those cases,” says ACSH's Jeff Stier.
Plaintiffs with cancer are still pushing hard for a bill to be considered again this fall that would pay $7.4 billion for health care and monitoring programs and provide them with additional compensation.
“The legislation that these plaintiffs are vying for would allow people who can’t prove a causal connection, because there isn’t likely to be one, to get money anyway. If they’re unhappy with their compensation, these plaintiffs should opt out of the settlement and sue independently,” says Stier.
