the meeting chaired by Dr. Wade about contracting issues and
whether or not the cost of the audit may exceed $3 million, and it
seemed clear across the
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spectrum that this was not going to be done for $3 million, given
400 audits that have to be done. And yet for all the people who
are here today who want to know whether the answer they get is
credible, we've got to do – those audits have to be done. You
know, there's -- this isn't going to get done on the cheap. Congress
has not set a ceiling on the amount of funds available for the audit.
That's a given fact. And yet I wondered when I heard the
discussion about well, one needs to consider budget constraints.
You sure do, but you also have to consider whether this program
is going to fulfill Congressional intent. And if the issue is additional
funds at the time you all deem appropriate to request those funds,
I certainly hope the Labor Department's going to be there, willing
and forthcoming, as opposed to the exchange we heard about well,
you haven't asked me and I haven't said no yet, but you know,
watch out. Finally I want to just talk a little bit about appeals.
At GAP we receive a call or an e-mail almost every day from
someone whose claim's been denied. It's the danger of having it on
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your web site that you do this kind of work. And in the course --
guess the thing that -- that people consistently say is how do we
interpret these dose reconstruction findings? What is an
administrative record? What are the bases of this gibberish that
we get? I mean people -- as Francine mentioned here earlier,
people are very much at sea. And I think they do deserve -- and
I don't know what the mechanism is, and I know Larry's been
very creative in trying to find ways to, you know, make this
program as transparent as he can, to try to find ways to convey
what the program is trying to do, your web site is just chock full
of stuff. But when claimants get those -- those determinations
back, I'm not sure whether it's in the exit interview process or
where in the -- where in the final process it is, people need to
decode that into English again for them. And I would just leave
you with a thought. If you can do that and you can help people
understand the product that you've produced for the Labor
Department to adjudicate, it's going to help people have a much
broader understanding of what they're
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dealing with. And I don't know whether that's, you know, the
named ombudsman or whether that's going to be, you know, a
function within NIOSH or whether there's somebody that has to
fill that function, but there really is a well identified hole here and
