Tom Harkin: “I am supporting the amendment. What I am trying to say here on the Senate floor is that even with this amendment there…”

“I am supporting the amendment. What I am trying to say here on the Senate floor is that even with this amendment there are certain people in Iowa who, because of the way it is structured, will not be adequately compensated. What I am saying to my friend from Virginia and others on the Senate floor is there is a special program that exists in about four different States where if workers have cancer or beryllium illness, they are automatically compensated. In Iowa, because we have no records of dosages and these people have cancer from beryllium, they should have also been put into that special program. Why should atomic workers from one State be put into that and atomic workers from another State exposed to the same kind of radiation not be? That is the case I am making here. I support the amendment. It takes us a long way. It gets us out of the Department of Energy into the Department of Labor. But it does not address the part of the compensation program that provides for people with cancer. I am saying NIOSH cannot do it, cannot reconstruct the radiation doses of people suffering from devastating cancers. These people in Iowa I believe are being discriminated against. They cannot reconstruct valid doses. This is exactly the type of situation Congress foresaw when we passed this legislation in 2000. Former weapons complex workers in Iowa are old, they are sick, and they are dying.”