Study: Insurer Asbestos Plan Won't Cover Deaths

"The current push by defendant industries to establish a national asbestos victims trust fund is driven in large part by the fact that courts consistently find asbestos companies guilty, not just of exposing their workers to a substance–asbestos–that could kill or severely injure them, but of doing this with full knowledge of the fatal consequences of their actions, and of actively concealing this truth from these same workers," the study says.

In response, Anne Sittmann, a representative of the Des Plaines, Ill.-based Property Casualty Insurers Association of America, said that it is important to note that the study was commissioned by the trial bar, the primary opponent to asbestos litigation reform in the country.

"The study appears to be riddled with typical trial lawyer rhetoric–just another effort by the trial bar to derail legal reform," Ms. Sittmann said.

Regarding the pending Senate legislation, she said PCI supports comprehensive reform that will ensure certainty and finality, affordability, and effectiveness and efficiency.

Ms. Sittmann added that funding allocation methodologies must reflect exposure and the associated risk of loss and not unduly shift liability to lesser-exposed insurers.

The EWG study cites a variety of documents dating back many years which, it says, demonstrate that insurance companies and manufacturers knew about the risks associated with asbestos for many years before it became public.

"These papers reveal a brazen disregard for the men and women who, by the 1960s, were dying by the thousands each year for these businesses, a history of abuse and deception that is unparalleled in American industrial history," the study says.

For example, the study cites a statement from the Washington-based American Insurance Association dating back to 1980 which predicted that there would be between 8,000 and 13,000 claims per year from asbestos-related cancer from 1977 through 1995.

However, the study says, this estimate did not include anything but pure occupational exposure to asbestos, even though asbestos was used in several thousand consumer and industrial products at that time, and exposure to the general public was not only "staggering" in size, but essentially uncontrolled.

"The potential liability represented by environmental pollution with asbestos and the release of asbestos fibers in the home became a subject of grave financial concern within the industry," the study says.

While the hazards of asbestos to family members were well known, the study says, nothing was done about it.

The documents show that by the 1970s, asbestos was clearly a potential catastrophe in the making for the insurance industry.

But the latency period of asbestos-related diseases allowed manufacturers and insurers to withhold this fact from workers for decades.

The study says that any solution to the asbestos epidemic, whether it be litigation, a trust fund or a combination of the two, must help everyone hurt by asbestos.

But the current proposal in the Senate, the study says, does not come close to this goal.