This is a particularly bad year to put more fiscal stress on towns. Hats off to House Speaker Brendan Sharkey and Minority Leader Themis Klarides for apparently blocking a bill that would have done so.
The bill, passed by the Senate 25-11 earlier in the week, has two main provisions. The first would create the rebuttable presumption that firefighters diagnosed with many forms of cancer contracted the disease on the job and are thus eligible for workers’ compensation.
The point of workers’ compensation is to help workers who are injured in the course of employment. There must be a causal relationship between the job and the injury. There is no hard evidence that firefighters have a greater incidence of cancer than the general population. The most extensive study of the relationship between firefighters and cancer, which is still ongoing at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, looked at 30,000 firefighters in three cities from 1950 to 2010. That study found certain cancers “modestly increased” among firefighters, but adds that “the risk of cancer in the fire service is still poorly understood.”
By some studies, firefighters spend only 5 percent of their time fighting fires. With proper training, protective gear and cleaning procedures, which likely have improved since 1950, the risk of cancer among firefighters should be lessened. If a firefighter contracts cancer, it’s not unreasonable to ask that a causal connection be shown between the disease and the job.
Bad Science
That should have been the lesson of the state’s last experience with a presumption based on bad science, the heart and hypertension law, which assumed that any cardiac illness or high blood pressure in cops and firefighters was job-related — ignoring genetics, obesity, smoking, etc. Begun in the 1970s and stopped for newly hired officers and firefighters in 1996, this fiasco has cost cities tens of millions of dollars to date. Can’t we be a little more careful this time?
The bill also would allow police officers to qualify for workers’ compensation for post-traumatic stress disorder if the mental or emotional problems stem from responding to a death intentionally caused by a person, but not deaths resulting from car accidents or other causes. That makes little sense medically, experts say: A gruesome motor vehicle accident can be just as traumatizing as a homicide.
Money
Before there is any change to the current system, the state should create clinically sound standards for determining the existence and job-relatedness of PTSD. If every police officer who sees a homicide victim files a claim, this could be the son of heart-and-hypertension — it is going to run into money.
Everyone knows that police officers and firefighters have hard and sometimes dangerous jobs. But police and firefighters are also special interests, and they come to the Capitol almost every year looking for more benefits. Before awarding new perks, lawmakers need to bring all parties to the table, ask if the benefits are necessary and cost them out. That didn’t happen here, as Mr. Sharkey said in announcing that the issue needed more study. Town officials were not at the table.
This was a hasty, ill-conceived piece of legislation. That it passed the Senate so handily is testament to that body’s tone-deaf obeisance to public sector unions. In times that demand spending discipline, lawmakers can’t give the unions everything they want, and the House leaders were right to pull the plug.
http://www.courant.com/opinion/editorials/hc-ed-bad-law-stopped-20150529-story.html