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New York Times

a day ago

A law that expired last year was meant to compensate civilians sickened by the legacy of the nation's aboveground nuclear testing program, as well as uranium miners.
Senate Republicans on Thursday included in their version of President Trump's domestic policy bill a provision that would revive and significantly expand a law for compensating victims of government-caused nuclear contamination who developed cancer and other serious illnesses.
The measure, long championed by Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, would overhaul a law passed more than three decades ago with a narrow scope. It was meant to compensate civilians sickened by the legacy of the nation's aboveground nuclear testing program, a hallmark of the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, and uranium miners who worked between 1942 and 1971. It paid out more than $2.6 billion in benefits to more than 55,000 claimants since its creation in 1990.
The Senate passed bipartisan legislation last year to substantially broaden the scope of that law — called the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, or RECA — beyond Cold War-era victims to cover others who have been harmed by the aftereffects in the decades since.
But after Republican leaders refused to allow it to come to a vote on the House floor, the law expired, dashing hopes of compensation for sickened civilians.
Senate Republican leaders are now, at the behest of Mr. Hawley, giving the measure another shot at passage, including it in the Senate version of the domestic policy bill that they are hoping to pass in weeks. He is considered a key vote on the bill because he opposes several provisions floated by his party for cutting Medicaid.
'I think about, in the St. Louis area alone, how many folks I've talked to whose grandfathers or grandmothers were involved with the radiation project and whose families have subsequently had cancer in the family for generations,' Mr. Hawley said in an interview. 'And they're very proud of their service to the nation, but they would like to be thanked for that and be treated appropriately and not lied to anymore by their government.'
The measure would revive the law and authorize its compensation fund to run for another two years. It would also expand eligibility to include civilians in the swaths of New Mexico, Utah and Arizona that were previously excluded from benefits coverage. And it would for the first time allow residents in Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky and Alaska — sites where workers processed uranium for the nation's nuclear program — who were exposed to nuclear contamination to be eligible for benefits.
Mr. Hawley's involvement in the issue stems from St. Louis's history with the atomic bomb. Scientists first began churning out uranium for the Manhattan Project in 1942 at the Mallinckrodt Chemical Works factory there.
But over the next several decades, hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive waste stored in open steel drums were hauled and dumped across the city. The waste seeped into the city's soil, including on land that later became ball fields, and into Coldwater Creek, a tributary that snakes through the metropolitan area for 19 miles through backyards and public parks. Rare cancers, autoimmune diseases and other mysterious illnesses have since spread through the community.
Lawmakers like Mr. Hawley have maintained that the government should help foot residents' health care bills.
Asked whether the inclusion of the measure might encourage him to support his party's domestic policy bill despite his concerns about the legislation's Medicaid provisions, Mr. Hawley suggested that it could.
'This will really dramatically increase the availability of health care for people in my state,' he said. 'If you are a RECA claimant, if you are a nuclear radiation survivor, then you're going to get a lot of help with your medical bills here. So what this is going to mean, practically in Missouri, is a lot of people are going to get a lot more access to health care, which is really, really important.'
Mr. Hawley continued: 'So, I still have concerns about Medicaid, and believe me, I'm talking about those on an almost hourly basis now with my leadership. But this is a big, big deal, and not just for my state. This is going to be a big deal for a lot of people, and it's going to help a lot of people get health care.'