quote:A deadly secret GREG GORDON; News Tribune Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - Some of the nation's largest insurance companies knew for decades that asbestos could kill but didn't warn workers or take other measures that might have averted the nation's worst workplace health disaster, industry documents show.
For years, dating to the 1930s, Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. downplayed or did not make public research indicating that asbestos could cause lung cancer and other diseases. Travelers Insurance and other carriers measured asbestos levels in factory air samples for years and pooled data on the mounting numbers of claims on behalf of workers dead or sick from asbestos illnesses.
The insurers did urge asbestos companies to reduce dust levels. But attorneys now suing the insurers contend the insurers should have required asbestos companies to protect their workers or to put warnings on asbestos products long before the companies began to do so in the mid-1960s.
In thousands of suits in Ohio and Texas, dozens of insurers are being accused of concealing or negligently failing to disclose the asbestos hazard. Separately, two class-action suits accuse a dozen insurers of fighting victims' claims with deceptive defenses that asbestos companies didn't fully know the perils of breathing the fibers.
Health experts project that asbestos could kill 500,000 U.S. workers and result in 3 million injury claims from some 27 million people exposed to it.
In Washington, workers across the state were exposed to asbestos at shipyards, power plants, refineries and in constructing skyscrapers in Tacoma and other cities. State health department officials say asbestos-related diseases have killed thousands.
The suits could test whether insurers can be held accountable if they conceal or fail to disclose knowledge that a policyholder's product is a health hazard. If the suits were to result in major awards for victims, consumer costs for other insurance products could soar.
Insurers, along with asbestos companies, are lobbying Congress for legislation to create a trust fund that would settle all asbestos litigation and limit their liability.
Craig Berrington, general counsel of the American Insurance Association, contended that the group's more than 400 casualty insurers had no special knowledge about asbestos diseases - illnesses that typically take 10 to 40 years to produce symptoms. Rather, he said insurers had access to the same medical studies as everybody else - and no duty to alert workers.
The insurers' "critical, but limited, role in society is to cover the costs of accidents and injuries," he said.
Arthur Caplan, the director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics, said the insurers' only legal duty is to their shareholders and that he would not expect them to alert lawyers to "sue us or make claims against us and drive us into bankruptcy."
However, Caplan said, "You can't just say that the company's interest is always paramount. At some point, when the bodies, the cancers and the failing lungs begin to pile up, you've got to take that information and move it out to public health authorities, government officials or doctors. ... You should be letting people know that there is a massive public health problem, if you have any ethics at all."
Dr. Henry Anderson, who is the chief medical officer for the Wisconsin Department of Public Health and who worked on pioneering asbestos research during the 1970s, said the insurers "had a moral obligation (to warn), both from the standpoint of protecting the workers as well as the companies employing them."
Concealing the truth
Researchers and plaintiffs attorneys have asserted for years that some of the biggest asbestos manufacturers engaged in a 40-year cover-up of the fibers' hazards. Now, thousands of documents coming to light detail what the insurance industry knew and what it did about the threat.
A News Tribune Washington Bureau review of hundreds of those documents found that:
•In 1931, a medical screening financed in part by MetLife found 42 of 195 Canadian asbestos miners and mill workers to have asbestosis, a slowly progressive lung disease that can be fatal. The study was never published. In 1935, three MetLife officials prepared a federal government study that found 64 U.S. workers with asbestosis, but at the suggestion of manufacturers, the researchers made revisions to minimize the disease's gravity.
•In 1932, Travelers rated asbestos exposure a significant enough hazard that it instructed its agents to decline to sell life insurance to asbestos workers after age 56.
•In the 1940s, the director of the Saranac Laboratory in upstate New York researched whether asbestos exposure would give laboratory mice asbestosis. But nine of the 11 mice in one study got a more deadly disease: lung cancer. Through the efforts of a MetLife official who oversaw Saranac, that finding and similar results were concealed.
•In 1952, a British health official presented data to a Saranac conference that linked asbestos to lung cancer, a finding that suggested asbestos workers could be facing early deaths. E.R.A. Merewether, Britain's chief inspector of factories, said that in tracing the deaths of 306 workers over a quarter-century from asbestos-related diseases, he found at least 48 had lung cancer. The conference was attended by manufacturers, government officials and representatives of MetLife, Travelers, Liberty Mutual and an insurance industry association. Unlike six prior Saranac dust-disease conferences, the transcript of this conference was not published.
•During World War II, insurers performed 65,000 safety inspections at shipyards under contracts with the Navy. Lawyers suing the insurers say they've seen no evidence that the inspectors warned the Navy that asbestos could harm the shipyard workers - among them thousands of insulators who labored to cover boilers and pipes with asbestos products. In the ensuing years, hundreds of thousands of those workers and Navy personnel were stricken with asbestos diseases.
•In mid-1975, after an appeals court opened the gates for a torrent of injury suits against asbestos manufacturers, Travelers formed an asbestos "catastrophe" subcommittee in an attempt to limit its liability. A year later, more than a dozen insurers began meeting to brainstorm tactics for defending the surge in injury suits against the companies they insured. The insurers, who for years had paid death and disability claims to victims of asbestos exposure, adopted a defense contending that manufacturers could not have foreseen before the late 1960s that asbestos fibers would sicken workers, particularly those handling finished products.
"What you've got here is basically a gigantic, systematic cover-up," said ethicist Caplan, contending it could "rank along with the greatest scandals of industry public health cover-up ever. The only thing I can think of like that is tobacco."
Living on borrowed time
Asbestos became a manufacturing staple in the early 1900s. The auto industry put the heat-resistant, fire-retardant mineral in brake linings and gaskets. Construction companies found it ideal for use in insulation and roofing materials. The mineral soon became a component in some 3,000 products. In many cases, no substitute materials were available.
Year after year, miners, plant workers and tradesmen - insulators, pipe-fitters, plumbers and electricians - gulped breaths of asbestos without knowing it could shorten their lives. By the 1950s and early 1960s, droves of them suffered from asbestosis, lung cancer or mesothelioma, a rare and deadly cancer of the lung lining or abdominal cavity.
Public health officials project that the annual number of deaths and illnesses from asbestos will not peak until about 2009, before starting to taper.
Among the thousands of afflicted Washington residents is Richard Anderson, 68, a Lakewood native and 1954 graduate of Clover Park High School who lives in the Hood Canal town of Seabeck in Kitsap County. He was found last January to be suffering from mesothelioma in his abdominal cavity after a routine hernia operation.
Anderson said he likely was exposed to asbestos in more than one setting, after serving in the Navy Reserves in the 1950s, on numerous occasions doing his own repairs on his vehicles' asbestos brake pads and working around asbestos-containing drywall as a carpenter from 1954-96.
"The doctor told me I had three to six months after the operation," he said. "That's a year ago."
Since his diagnosis, he said, doctors have drained 8 liters of fluid buildup from his abdomen - apparently his body's way of trying to rid cancer from his abdominal wall.
"If the insurance people are involved in it, that's worse yet," he said of the asbestos disaster. "If you go back that many years and people were getting sick, somebody must have known something."
A different time, standards
Dr. Wilhelm Hueper, who was a senior scientist at the National Cancer Institute, offered an explanation for the industry's sluggish response to the cancer threat from asbestos and other toxins in a 1943 medical journal article. He said commercially interested parties were "not particularly anxious" to disclose illnesses that might tarnish their images, force expensive equipment upgrades or bring worker suits "with extravagant financial claims."
Thus, he said, it is not unusual for "financially interested" parties to exert pressure "to keep information on the occurrence of industrial cancer well under cover."
The industry's actions also occurred in a different era, long before workplace safety rules became commonplace.
Berrington of the insurance association said it is an inherent part of the American legal system that a defendant cannot be found to have been negligent if "based upon what a reasonable person knew at the time, you did a reasonable thing."
Class-action suits in West Virginia and Massachusetts accuse Travelers, Aetna, Liberty Mutual, CIGNA, ACE, One Beacon and half a dozen other insurers of fraudulently depriving victims of rightful compensation by denying their clients knew of asbestos' dangers. The insurers have argued asbestos companies couldn't have fully known asbestos' dangers until after 1964, when researcher Irving Selikoff of New York's Mt. Sinai Hospital released a study tracing patterns of asbestosis and lung cancer among tradesmen.
Berrington said he could not speak to the conduct of individual insurers, but he dismissed the class-action suits as "outrageous." He said evidence of asbestos' risks "was in the medical literature" and in the hands of federal agencies in earlier years, arguing it was the government's job, not the insurers', to bring it to public attention.
In the Ohio and Texas suits, individual victims charge asbestos manufacturers and dozens of insurers of concealing for decades that asbestos is hazardous.
Like spokesmen for Liberty Mutual, MetLife and One Beacon, a Travelers official declined to comment on the allegations in the suits.
'100 percent preventable'
But Travelers spokesman Keith Anderson alleged in a letter to the News Tribune Washington Bureau that disclosure of insurers' internal documents is driven by "trial lawyers who hope to personally pocket millions of dollars from ongoing litigation and who hope to derail efforts to correct an out-of-control asbestos litigation system."
Pointing to the need for a national settlement of all asbestos injury suits, he noted that Travelers has already paid billions of dollars in claims and put $3 billion more in reserve.
The suits and all other insurance industry legal liability for asbestos injuries would largely disappear if Congress passes the proposed $100 billion-plus comprehensive settlement of asbestos injury claims. The concept of a trust fund to pay all claims has bipartisan support because the current system has created inequities among victims and has driven 67 asbestos-related companies into bankruptcy. But negotiations are stalled. Insurers balked at a bill calling on them to pay as much as $74.5 billion over 27 years. The insurers say they will pay no more than $46 billion.
Members of a loose network of attorneys who are bringing the suits contend the insurers bear a big burden for the asbestos tragedy.
"The worst workplace disaster in American history was 100 percent preventable," said Cincinnati lawyer Bruce Carter, a member of the American Bar Association's asbestos task force. "What the insurance companies knew about the risks of cancer was never disclosed to either the physicians responsible for plant safety or the unions who tried to maintain safe workplaces."
He said insurers could have taken many steps, including threatening to cancel policies unless asbestos companies took safety precautions and warned their workers and customers. They also could have ensured that government and private medical studies on asbestos were accurate "by providing the information that they had about the true nature of the harm" it could cause, Carter said.
More recently, it was an insurance company that alerted federal regulators to a problem with Firestone tires that resulted in dozens of fatalities.
Berrington responded: "I think it would be a grossly inaccurate thing to say that collection of information about claims was in any way related to the insurance industry having more medical information about asbestos than was in the general literature."
Richard Anderson of Seabeck, who doctors say should be dead from an asbestos-related disease
ASBESTOS' TOLL
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Asbestos deaths are expected to continue in signficant numbers for decades as asbestos-related diseases develop in workers who were exposed before protections were put into place. Estimates of the total number of asbestos-related deaths are considered low because the diseases sometimes don't develop until 40 years later and many earlier victims didn't connect the diseases to their jobs. Also, surveys have focused on workers in high-risk industries, though employees in many other sectors have been exposed.
Projected cumulative total
Injury claims* 1-3 million
Deaths Up to 500,000 (from 1930s through 2040)
Litigation costs** $200-265 billion
**Cost estimates are by consulting firms of Tillinghast-Towers Perrin and Milliman USA. *Many claimants have X-rays showing pleural scarring, but no asbestos-related disease symptoms.
SOURCES: National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health; Rand Institute for Civil Justice; 1982 study by William Nicholson, George Perkel and Dr. Irving Selikoff.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Wow, I don't know what to say. This is, in my mind, totally outrageous. These companies knew of the health risks back in the 30's, but didn't say anything about it (in at least one case, actively worked to conceal the results).
This article helped to lower my ranking of insurance companies even lower than it was before. IMO, they're below spammers.
I'd like to see what excuses the insurance companies (it was more than one) offer when they see their day in court over this.
Posts: 851 | Registered: Oct 2001
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quote:What you've got here is basically a gigantic, systematic cover-up," said ethicist Caplan, contending it could "rank along with the greatest scandals of industry public health cover-up ever. The only thing I can think of like that is tobacco."
I agree.
quote: Craig Berrington, general counsel of the American Insurance Association, contended that the group's more than 400 casualty insurers had no special knowledge about asbestos diseases - illnesses that typically take 10 to 40 years to produce symptoms. Rather, he said insurers had access to the same medical studies as everybody else - and no duty to alert workers.
A straight-up lie. This article and other research shows a systematic and sucessful (for more than 40 years) scheme to cover up and keep out of the medical literature information detrimental to health--of workers and in the short term, of the finances of their clients and the insurance companies themselves. But now that 500,000 deaths and more injuries come to light, they deny as much liability as possible and want US taxpayers to pick up the slack. Typical big business cost-shifting, or cost-shafting.
quote:[insurer's had] no duty to alert workers.The insurers' "critical, but limited, role in society is to cover the costs of accidents and injuries," he said.
From the same shyster as above. What about their duties from one human being to another? Is that not on the balance sheet anywhere?
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My grandmother was one of those who died due to unknown Asbestos poisoning leading to Lung Cancer.
On the other hand, my Step-Father-In-Law died of cancer that his insurance mandated medical checkup showed in its earlier stages. The doctors reported it to the insurance company, as they were ordered to do. Nobody told him, which allowed it to grow till it was incurable.
That insurance company was the US Vetran's Administration. The doctors worked for a Veteran's hospital.
Posts: 11895 | Registered: Apr 2002
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posted
This is a chilling story but not really surprising. Insurance companies' goal is to make money. They will do almost anything not to pay, it sometimes seems to me.
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I'm irritated at the insurance company because I recently bought some renter's insurance.
Mold is not included. If I find mold, too bad. However, the premiums are much, much higher than years before because of mold.
"Why am I paying for this?" "To spread the risk." "There is no risk, because it isn't covered. What you're spreading is cost." "Um, okay. Still stands."
Side Note: The only reason I knew it wasn't covered was because I made him read me the policy. They "could not" send out a copy of the policy unless I had put money down. I couldn't see it until I committed to it.
"I'm not committing to anything until I know what I'm in for." "Well, I could read it to you." "Okay." "Really?" "Yes."
He then spent the next twenty-five minutes reading me the policy. I made him at first out of pique, and because I really did want to know the first part - what was covered and what wasn't. After a bit, I was bored, so I had him summarize.
I probably shot myself in the foot. After making him read the entire policy to me, I was too embarassed to turn it down.
Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
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quote:They "could not" send out a copy of the policy unless I had put money down. I couldn't see it until I committed to it.
They wouldn't let you see the policy until you put money down? That is certainly unethical, if not illegal. You could consider reporting that to the state insurance commision/regulators. They seem to be relying on most people's boredom/fear of fine print to coerce money out of people, and they probably do it to make it harder for their competitors to get copies of current policies.
Posts: 6316 | Registered: Jun 2003
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posted
He was just so polite. Also, the mold didn't bother me so much because I don't own my house. Plus... *sigh* I'm lazy. It's true. I'll do better next time.
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