Kentucky Enflames The Republican War On Science To A New Level

The state of Kentucky has taken the Republican War On Science to a new level with a recent law regarding Black Lung patients in the state. Ring of Fire's Mike Papantonio and Farron Cousins discusses this.

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The state of Kentucky has taken the Republican war on science to a new level with a recent law regarding black lung patients in the state. What this case is about is there are, they have a handful of doctors in the state of Kentucky that the industry wants to have exclusive right on determining whether or not a worker has black lung disease. Clearly if you look at a differential diagnosis, what happens is doctors have these checklists that they use for what they call differential diagnosis.

The most important, the number one important issue is what does the radiograph look like? What does the x-ray look like? It's call pneumoconioses. It's a broad type of disease, but there are people who are specialized in that. They're certified specialists in reading radiographs; they're called B Readers. And they have a system, in fact, that they've had for decades. I mean, this didn't just happen yesterday. It's been going on for seven decades where you have a system of ILO readers that put an x-ray up and diagnose is it asbestosis, is it some other kind of pneumoconiosis, is it black lung disease. They can tell by the scarring, they can tell by the way that the x-ray looks as far as the structure of the lung and where's the scarring in the lung. So the Kentucky legislature that gets a ton of money from the coal industry there has been pushed into the idea that we don't want real experts; we don't really want specialists looking at this. We want these troll doctors that we're pulling in because they work for us.

I read the story time and time again. I read it three times, trying to say did this really just happen in Kentucky? It's unconstitutional. It'll be reversed. It's an equal protection problem that the idiots in Kentucky legislature didn't have enough sense to understand it's a clear equal protection problem.

Absolutely, but you know, it can get struck down by the courts, but these people will never face any kind of comeuppance for voting in favor of this. This was a thing that was supported by both the Chamber of Commerce and the Kentucky Coal Association. They were the ones pushing this because they're the ones who stand to gain the most from it. Yes, if you limit the number of doctors and the kinds of doctors -- because now you can't have those B Readers coming in and giving a diagnosis; it has to be a state-picked physician that meets whatever requirements the coal industry wants them to meet -- you're only going to have a few. So if you're on this side of Kentucky and there's no doctors over there, well you're going to have to drive to the other side of the state to go one of these state-approved doctors. You're going to have to wait a long time because there's so few of them and so many black lung cases now. It's doubled since the '90s-

I just started to say-

-it's doubled.

-it's on a huge rise right now.

It is. And so limiting the doctors while increasing the number of instances is going to make backlogs. People could die waiting to getting it diagnosed.

What's the end result of that? The end result is the taxpayers end up taking care of these people. You see, the industry gets away with saying, well, it's not black lung disease. It's COPD, it's some other type of pneumoconiosis, idiopathic pneumoconiosis, we don't really know. So in the end, the company gets away with having to pay for that individual's care, and taxpayers usually have to pick that up. They have to pick it up through Medicaid, all types of welfare mechanisms that have to end up taking care of that. So what it is, it's externalizing, the company has externalized their risk. They've moved it away from their company into the seat of taxpayers again.