Nuke worker’s widow gets yet another denial on claim

Bo Fellinger thinks she has a right to be disgusted.

Fellinger recently found out U.S. Department of Labor medical consultants denied her deceased husband Michael’s claim for compensation for chronic lung disease yet again. She does not have much good to say about the department or its Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program (EEOICPA). Michael, a former nuclear worker at the Ames Laboratory who died of lung failure at age 62, has had a claim pending for nearly four years.

Ethelwyn "Bo" Fellinger holds a family picture of herself, daughter Deborah, and husband Michael. Michael Fellinger died in 2008 of lung failure that has been attributed to his work at the Ames Laboratory in the late 1960's and 1970's. (Photo by Deanna Dent, provided courtesy of the Ames Tribune).

“The program strikes me as some stupid headless animal,” she says of the bureaucracy she has endured since before Michael’s death in 2008. “Everyone involved seems to be standing in a circle, handing things around to the next person without taking any responsibility for it. The buck never stops anywhere.”

Signed into law in 2000, the EEOICPA 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 associated with their work.

But as The Iowa Independent has reported previously, the program has instead created such layers of bureaucracy 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.

Michael Fellinger worked as a graduate student in high energy physics at the Ames Laboratory in 1960s and early 1970s. He produced lab equipment both for the Ames Laboratory and another Department of Energy site, Argonne Laboratories in Illinois. According to his claim documents, Fellinger was likely exposed to beryllium, known to cause chronic lung disease. He became ill in 1996, and his health rapidly deteriorated into lung disease, lung infections and constant hospitalizations. He contracted esophageal cancer, another illness linked to toxic metals exposure, in 2003. The first letter from the government denying his claim arrived the day he died.

Defending mistakes

“I am shocked,” said Dr. Laurence Fuortes, director of the Former Worker Screening Program at the University of Iowa who has been advocating Michael Fellinger’s case and whose work is used to determine eligibility for the federal program. “This pattern of defending mistakes is simply bizarre.”

Fuortes believes he has adequately proven that Michael Fellinger’s lung disease was caused by his exposures at the Ames Laboratory, through accepted medical literature that supports his diagnoses, through site data that confirms the presence of the toxins, through statistics showing a high rate of occupational lung disease among former Ames Lab workers and through cases similar to Michael’s which were accepted.  The Department of Labor, Fuortes said, refuses to consider any of them.

“This has been reviewed by three contract medical consultants from the DOL, and none of them are experts in occupational lung disease,” Fuortes said. “The Department of Labor is defending these denials through any argument they can come up with.”

Unless Fellinger and Fuortes can provide any new evidence to suggest the Department of Labor consultants are wrong, she has exhausted her appeals for review.

“There isn’t any new evidence, and they know it. And old evidence should have been more than adequate,” said Fellinger.

Legislation to correct problems stuck in committee

The Charlie Wolf Nuclear Workers Compensation Act, which would more directly address the frustrations of claimants like Fellinger, has been waiting for more than a year in the U.S. Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee, which U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin chairs.

The bill is not scheduled for hearing at this point, and is considered by Senate insiders as unlikely to get off the ground without further support from states with significant nuclear worker populations, such as Colorado, New Mexico, and Washington.

On Monday the original sponsor of the legislation, U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., called once again for passage of the Act, after learning the nuclear worker for whom the bill was named, Charlie Wolf, had yet again been denied his claim. Wolf died last year, and his claim has now been pending eight years.

“Charlie and workers like him across the country are patriots and veterans of the Cold War,” Udall said in a prepared statement. “I had hoped that with a new Administration and a new Congress, things would change, and that’s why I’m again calling for passage of my bill as soon as possible. It’s long past time to do right by these workers.”

U.S. Reps. Ed Perlmutter and Jared Polis, both Democrats from Colorado, joined Udall in support of the legislation.

A claim without the claimant

Fellinger says she is “deeply grateful” for Fuortes’ assistance navigating the bureaucratic tangle of the program.

“I couldn’t do this without his help,” she said. “He is a force of nature.”

Despite the ongoing claim struggles, she admits she tries to think of the reason behind it as little as possible.

“Michael’s death, the manner of his death, was very damaging to me,” she said. “His last hours were horrific.”

But her husband’s attitude, had he survived his lung disease, would be on the side of humor.

“His reaction to the denial would be something witty and cutting,” she said. “He had a very dry sense of humor and an appreciation of the ridiculous.”