Benefits for 9/11 rescue workers

President Obama this week signed legislation providing $4.2 billion in federal health benefits and damages to firefighters, police, and other rescue workers who were sickened by toxic dust and fumes while responding to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center. The bill will be paid for by a new fee on foreign companies that get U.S. procurement contracts. It was passed in the final hours of the last Congress, despite Republican opposition led by Sens. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who argued that it was “overgenerous” and would worsen the federal deficit and invite fraud and abuse. But Republicans dropped their filibuster and negotiated a downsized bill after TV satirist Jon Stewart highlighted the issue with withering commentary on The Daily Show.

After 9/11, more than 70,000 “first responders” from New York and other states worked in the Trade Center’s smoldering rubble for weeks, looking for survivors and bodies. Hundreds later developed scarred lungs and other respiratory problems, damaged gastrointestinal tracts, or cancers. Health professionals testified before Congress that the illnesses were related to inhaling the toxic cloud that lingered over the Trade Center site—including pulverized concrete, glass, and other building materials, jet-fuel fumes, and a stew of chemicals.

Paying for the rescue workers’ medical care “is right and it is just,” said the New York Daily News in an editorial. “In vast battalions, they searched for the missing and then the dead. They were poisoned as they labored.” Most did not wear protective masks because Christine Whitman, then the head of the federal Environmental Protection Agency, assured them the air was safe. How shameful that “too many Republicans in the House and Senate” viewed these ailing heroes as “something of an annoyance.”

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There’s no shame in asking hard questions about how the taxpayers’ money is spent, said John McCormack in TheWeeklyStandard.com. Thanks to Coburn’s objections, a $7.4 billion bill was reduced to $4.2 billion, and a 10 percent cap was put on trial lawyers’ fees. Stewart called Republican opposition “insane,” but what’s really nuts is insisting that a government with a trillion-dollar deficit should be spending more money.