First, Help the Sick

The continuing flood of asbestos injury lawsuits clogging courts around the country now represents the longest-running legal saga in American history. That unhappy distinction should prod Congress to step in at last.

In recent decades, more than half a million men and women, most of them blue-collar workers, have sued companies that made or used products containing asbestos. Many are desperately sick with respiratory cancers or other conditions causing severe breathing difficulties, but most who say they were exposed to asbestos aren’t currently ill.

Lawyers for the earliest asbestos victims were heroes. In the 1970s, they exposed corporate bosses who for decades had told their employees to mine asbestos or insulate ships with it even though company officials knew the material was deadly. When workers fell ill, many coughing up blood, their bosses refused to tell them that asbestos might be the reason. In trial after trial, executives swore that something else must have caused the plaintiffs’ diseases -- though juries increasingly refused to buy that line.

At this point, there’s plenty of dishonor to be shared. By the labor unions that have shamelessly trolled their ranks for plaintiffs, many of them likely never to fall ill with asbestos-caused disease. By lawyers who have grown rich off these cases but still charge 30% contingency fees to process plaintiffs in impersonal batches of 1,000 or more. And certainly by the corporate defendants.

Asbestos litigation has already cost the U.S. economy $54 billion, according to a Rand Corp. estimate. Plaintiffs have sued some 6,000 companies. Legal fees and payouts have bankrupted dozens of corporations, with more failures to come. Desperately sick plaintiffs can still wait years before they get to court; many have died before their trial dates.

By clumping cases into huge groups, lawyers haggle with the corporations and their insurers over the value of workers’ injuries, often shaking them down on behalf of clients who were merely exposed to asbestos while underpaying people who are acutely ill.

For years, policymakers have tried to devise a speedier, fairer way to resolve this mess. The continuing bankruptcies and estimates of half a million or more asbestos lawsuits to come may have created momentum for reform.

The most thoughtful proposal, which Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla.) introduced as legislation this month, would make sure that payouts go where they are most needed, to people who are already ill. Those who fall ill in the future would be able to seek compensation then. This approach won important support in recent weeks from the American Bar Assn. Congress should pass Nickles’ legislation.