Feinberg and those damned health claims…

A month ago, I wrote about the Advocates for Environmental Human Rights Report that clearly showed how Feinberg and the GCCF have made it very difficult, if not impossible for Gulf Coast claimants to receive compensation for health claims, especially when compared to previous claims funds he’s administered. When it came to both the 9-11 fund and Agent Orange compensation, all a claimant needed to show was proximity to the event and a medical diagnosis to receive compensation for health claims, but when it comes to the oil spill, proximity and diagnosis is not nearly enough. In the Gulf, a claimant must also show medical proof of causation, and that changes everything, especially when one considers:

“When asked if claimants could medically prove their illness as caused by the oil disaster, Linda Birnbaum, Director of the National  Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), answered emphatically, “No, they can not.” Birnbaum further stressed that to ask residents to provide causality between BP’s oil and chemical dispersants and their illnesses is simply not possible, and emphasized it is not because they are not sick, but because the medical and scientific communities simply do not know enough about the effects of chemical dispersants and crude oil on human health to prove such a claim.”

Regardless, Ken has stated he will be hiring “medical experts” to analyze these claims for validity. Okay, but if medical causality of the claims cannot be proven by known medical science as valid, what validity exactly is he checking on?

The validity of a health claims whitewash?

The validity of the GCCF?

No, I know…

Feinberg’s checking on the same validity he had those environmental experts checking when they said the Gulf environment would be okay by 2013. He’s checking on the validity of the unknown. But that seems just another folly, a cover, a way to perhaps throw up his hands in the future exclaiming how he did all he could, when in fact what needs to be checked here is not the validity of an individual claim’s medical causality, but the validity of Feinberg’s demands for proof.

Rather than hiring medical experts, perhaps he should instead hire more Public Relations people to check on the validity of Gulf Coast skepticism.

In any case, I hear the distinct sound of claimants slipping through the GCCF’s cracks, yet again, and this time with thousands of dollars in medical bills…

And the reality of those medical bills?

Quite valid. 

Have a nice day.