October 26th, 2004
The latest mesothelioma trust fund proposal, which has spent months being banded back and forth between Senators Bill Frist and Tom Daschle, is dead in the water, and the outlook for its resurrection look to be very bleak indeed.
Patients and support groups are likely to be celebrating the failure of this proposal before it even got off the ground. The proposal was designed to alter the way that compensation claims are assessed and paid to victims of mesothelioma, but according to victims, lawyers and support groups was designed to save the companies responsible for asbestos exposure from bankruptcy rather than to ensure that victims got the compensation they deserved.
When recently asked about the bill, Committee Chairman, Orin Hatch, simply stated: "There's not going to be one." Hatch did go on to state that one of the reasons for the bill’s downfall was the unreasonable written requests made by Senator Daschle. He stated: "When the one-pager came over from Daschle that absolutely meant that they were going to kill the bill. There's no way anybody with any brains would have agreed to his provisions. It just means billions of dollars for the trial lawyers, who really don't deserve it. The Democrats have really screwed this up."
There have been disagreements between Republican Senator Bill Frist and Democrat Senator Daschle ever since the proposal was put together. Daschle wanted all cases currently going through the court process to continue whereas Frist wanted them to be transferred to the new system. Frist was also in disagreement with the timeframe for putting the new system into operation as proposed by Daschle. It seems that amidst the arguments, the Senators managed to miss their opportunity to actually try and enforce the bill.
Orin Hatch stated that it was now too late to complete the bill, and went on to say: "I think it will be too late next year. About $30 billion will probably dry up and there will be more companies in bankruptcy."
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