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Three years.
That’s the wait time for medical claim decisions from a Department of Labor program that compensates former federal nuclear workers who developed illnesses related to their work, according to a Government Accountability Office report released Monday.
U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin (Lauren Victoria Burke/WDCPIX.COM)
The report reflects concerns claimants have had for years about the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act. The GAO’s performance audit covered the program from November 2008 to March 2010.
Signed into law in 2000, the program was designed to compensate former nuclear workers with lump sum payments and medical benefits for illnesses linked to their exposures to radiation and toxic substances.
But as The Iowa Independent reported previously, the program has instead created such layers of bureaucracy and claim denials that it has become the target of criticism not only from former nuclear workers struggling to get compensation for their dangerous work history, but from advocacy groups, medical experts and even the senators who authored the original legislation.
In 2008, the GAO was asked to look into program processing times, costs and transparency by 17 members of Congress, including U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who issued a statement late Monday on the report.
“Some claimants had to wait three years just for the government to rule on their case, and that’s unacceptable,” Harkin said. “The recommendations the GAO makes in this report will help the DOL be more responsive to affected workers, and I am currently looking at the best way to implement these fixes.”
One of the fixes could be The Charlie Wolf Nuclear Workers Compensation Act, which has been stuck in the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee since March 2009. Harkin is the HELP committee chairman.
Harkin and other members of the HELP committee have said repeatedly that they wanted to wait for the outcome of the newest GAO report before taking up the bill for review. But as advocates for reform have repeatedly pointed out, the findings in the new report are strikingly similar to GAO reports published throughout the program’s nine-year history.
Key findings of the new report include:
Timeliness: Estimating radiation exposure adds two years to process.
While the Department of Labor and other agencies involved in the processing of sick nuclear workers’ claims have put performance goals and strategies in place to streamline the process, claims still get hung up on “dose reconstruction,” a process to estimate a claimant’s likely levels of radiation exposure. That process, performed by the National Institute of Occupational Health and Safety on a case-by-case basis, adds on average more than 2 years to a former worker’s claim processing time.
Costs: Administrative costs represent 20 percent of total program cost.
“Over the life of the program, direct administrative costs have averaged about 20 percent of the total program cost for Part B and 14 percent for Part E,” the GAO report says, which breaks down the program between the two coverage areas of the compensation package.
“The cost of administering EEOICPA reflects its science-based adjudication process and the highly technical nature of the claims.”
Oversight: Parts of EEOICPA lack independent and expert review
While the dose reconstruction process provided by NIOSH undergoes external and expert review, other parts of the EEOICPA do not, including chronic occupational lung disease claims and non-radioactive toxic exposure. Also at issue is the “site exposure matrix,” the database of nuclear work site information provided by the Department of Energy and used to settle claims — it also has no expert review process to validate the accuracy of its information.
The GAO recommended a three-part solution:
1. Establish external reviews for medical review of claims.
2. Work with the Department of Energy to provide more information about the Site Exposure Matrix, where possible.
3. Public response to claimant concerns reported by the EEOICPA Office of the Ombudsman annually.
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