The Washington, D.C.-based insurer lobbyist American Insurance Association (AIA) praised the Ohio General Assembly’s passage of the first asbestos reform legislation in the country that helps “truly sick victim of asbestos exposure get compensated quickly and fairly for their injuries.” The bill now will go to the Republican Gov. Robert Taft for his signature.
The reform measure, HB 292, would require asbestos claimants to meet a minimum level of medical criteria before filing an action, AIA said. The measure would toll the statute of limitations, so that individuals who do not yet show signs of impairment would be able to file a claim when and if they ever do get sick. Currently, thousands of claims involve people who are not currently sick or had minimal exposure to the substance, clogging the state’s courts, forcing those truly sick to wait in line or get lost in the process while closing area businesses.
Asbestos was phased out of most nonessential uses in the United States by the late 1970s, yet thousands of new claims are being brought each year. These new asbestos cases are driven largely by mass x-ray screenings, which swell the asbestos plaintiff class with people who either are unimpaired and quite healthy, or are suffering from medical conditions not caused by exposure to asbestos. Studies recently have shown that up to 90 percent of all asbestos claims are filed on behalf of individuals who are not sick from asbestos—and may never become sick. Asbestos litigation has bankrupted nearly 70 companies nationwide in the past twenty years and clogged the courts with more than 300,000 pending cases.
The AIA also praised the “landmark legislation” addressing silica and mixed dust compensation claims (HB 342) that the General Assembly passed.
HB 342 uses American Medical Association guidelines to establish medical criteria to objectively sort and give order to the growing number of silica and mixed dust claims, AIA said. This is designed to ensure that individuals who are truly sick from exposure to these materials receive swift compensation. The expectation is that this streamlined process will help curb lawsuit abuse, including such things as mass-screenings and recruitment of plaintiffs who have no physical injury.
Many silica lawsuits are being generated by personal injury lawyers who honed their skills on asbestos cases, AIA said in a statement. The same lawsuit-generating tactics and mechanisms that worked to generate claims for the asbestos plaintiffs’ bar are now being exploited in the silica context. The lawyers are trying to diversify their litigation portfolios.
Topics Legislation Claims Ohio
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