Jim Matheson: “I recognize that much of this bill I am very supportive of, but I want to talk about one component that has been left…”

“I recognize that much of this bill I am very supportive of, but I want to talk about one component that has been left out of this bill. Many years ago, about 1990, Congress passed something called the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. At that time, Congress admitted, the Federal Government admitted that it had lied to people in this country about the safety, the safety of open air nuclear testing, the safety of those who worked in the uranium mines. I have constituents in my State, in my State who are dying from these conditions. Congress admitted they were at fault, that the Federal Government lied to these folks and they said, we are going to compensate you for this. But something interesting happened in the past year. We did not appropriate enough money. So we had people literally dying that were sent letters saying, well, you do qualify for this compensation, we just do not have money from Congress to pay you. Now, we took care of it this year on a short-term basis with a supplemental appropriation, and that was fine and good. We got payments to some of those folks before they died, but there is no reason for us to have to go through this on a year-by-year basis. We should make this a mandatory component.”