Jeff Bingaman: “Under guidelines developed by the HHS and used in this amendment, if your radiation does was high enough to make it at…”

“Under guidelines developed by the HHS and used in this amendment, if your radiation does was high enough to make it at least as likely as not that your cancer was DOE-work-related, you would be eligible for compensation for lost wages and medical benefits. The HHS-based method will work for many of the workers at DOE sites. But it won't work for a significant minority who were exposed to radiation, but for whom it would be infeasible to reconstruct their dose. There are several reasons why reconstructing a dose might be--this infeasibility might exist. First, relevant records of dose may be lacking, or might not exist altogether. Second, there might be a way to reconstruct the dose, but it would be prohibitively expensive to do so. Finally, it might take so long to reconstruct a dose for a group of workers that they will all be dead before we have an answer that can be used to determine their eligibility. One of the workers who testified at my Los Alamos hearing might be an example of a worker who could fall into the cracks of a system that operated solely on dose histories.”