Do All Those Workers Really Have Asbestosis?

It's an ugly fact that many people don’t want to think about. But there are a lot of spurious claims for asbestosis clogging up the legal and medical systems. And those spurious claims are keeping the victims who are really ill from getting the money and the help that they need.

Everyone knows the asbestos companies are guilty. There’s no question about that; those companies played Russian roulette with other people’s lives and never even told them about it. Many people want to see those companies pay—literally—so why not grab a few bucks and serve a good cause at the same time?

Everyone is playing the game—attorneys, “victims,” even doctors are out to grab a piece of the asbestos pie.

This is how it works. Slightly shady attorneys hold “screenings” in industrial areas, well publicized in advance with flyers splashed around the neighborhood. Everyone who attends gets a chest x-ray and fills out a form describing their work with asbestos. Then the attorneys find a tame or sympathetic doctor who will read the chest x-rays the way they want them read, and the case is ready for filing.

Because multiple asbestos claimants can be grouped together into one case, the attorneys don’t even have to pay a filing fee for each person. They can shuffle a hundred or even a thousand files together into one case and pay a single filing fee, keeping their costs even lower.

The doctors read a hundred or more x-rays every day and find that all of the “patients” have asbestosis or pleural damage. They certify so many people as injured in a single day, using the same language on each report—which are often pre-printed—that nobody takes their work seriously. Doctors have lost their licenses by playing this game.

One of the sad parts of this game is that some “patients” actually believe they are ill. They seek medical treatment that they don’t need, spending money they often don’t have, seeking relief for a problem that doesn’t exist—just because an attorney and a doctor, who should know better, told them with a wink that they were ill.

Not all screenings are scams, not all asbestos attorneys are shysters, and not all lung specialists are quacks. There are many dedicated asbestos attorneys who fight this fight because they believe in it, holding screenings to find the people who are truly ill and don’t know it. These attorneys send their patients—not only their chest x-rays—to conscientious doctors who are specialists in occupational medicine. And these doctors examine the entire patient to determine if that person really is ill.

Many of the asbestos companies have declared bankruptcy to get out of paying verdicts that these spurious claims have helped push into the millions of dollars. At this point, there really is only so much money to go around. Siphoning funds away into spurious claims leaves nothing for the mesothelioma and cancer victims, the ones who really need it. It is irresponsible at best.

Some states, such as Texas, have channeled all of their asbestos cases into a system where claimants have to prove they really are ill before they can collect money. But it’s a shame the attorneys, doctors, and workers who aren’t really ill can’t restrain themselves without such a system.