Does Mr. Cheney live without medical insurance? Halliburton contractors do
Thaddeus Stevens
Adding Insult to Injury: Halliburton Contractors Denied Insurance Benefits
by David Phinney
Mark Baltazar was between jobs operating heavy construction equipment when he
heard he could make $84,000 doing the same work in Iraq. When he took the job, his
plan was to save up the tax-free money and then buy a new home for his family back
in Texas.
A suicide bomber near Mosul changed all that last December, just one month and
three weeks after Baltazar started work with Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg,
Brown & Root (KBR), the largest military contractor in Iraq.
On Dec. 21, 2004, the 32-year-old father of five, who was raised in Odessa, Texas
and moved to Houston 14 years ago, had just finished lunch when it happened. He
was in the sprawling KBR mess tent at Camp Merez where hundreds of U.S. troops,
Iraqi security forces and U.S. civilian contractors were eating. The bomber then
launched one of the bloodiest attacks on U.S. forces since the invasion began. The
explosion swept through the tent, hurled Baltazar into the air and sent him
crashing down over the back of a chair.
A total of 69 people were wounded, including Balthazar and 24 other civilian
contractors. Seven of the 22 left dead were KBR employees and subcontractors. One
was a co-worker of Baltazar's who had just left the table to get some ice cream.
It was the last time Baltazar saw him alive.
Six months later, like many civilian workers injured in Iraq, Baltazar is still
battling with KBR's insurance adjusters. If he wins, he hopes to be paid the
disability benefits he needs to support himself and his family.
Instead of saving for a new home, Baltazar finds himself worse off then he was
when he left for Iraq; he's jobless because of his injuries, living in a Houston
apartment, and relying on a $368 disability check every two weeks.
"You make more money working at McDonald's," he says dejectedly.
Because he worked for Halliburton's KBR, which uses Cayman Island subsidiaries to
employ 70 percent of it's workers, Baltazar is not eligible for unemployment.
Baltazar's lawyer says he is also being denied full insurance coverage worth more
than $1,000 a week as outlined in the Defense Base Act (DBA). The DBA requires
businesses working overseas under U.S. funded contracts to provide insurance
coverage for injuries and disabilities of all employees. Subcontractors are
responsible for providing similar coverage to their workers. Baltazar's projected
DBA amount is a sum based on the comparative annual income he would be making if
he hadn't been injured.
Immediately after the bombing, KBR medics x-rayed Baltazar's back. They gave him
morphine and said he was fine. But after spending two days resting in his trailer,
Balthazar recalls, he told his supervisors he wanted medical leave to go back to
the United States and see a doctor of his choice.
"I wanted to return to work after some medical leave," Baltazar explains. "They
said my injuries weren't severe enough to send me home, so I either had to stay in
Iraq or quit."
Since January, he has been getting spinal injections and visiting a physical
therapist three times a week to help ease the pain of the back injury he sustained
when he landed on the chair. He also suffers from hearing loss and blurry eyesight
because of the blast and receives psychological counseling for post-traumatic
stress disorder.
PTSD
Commonly known as PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder often appears as a
temporary psychological condition, but it can also last a lifetime. Symptoms
include major depression and anxiety that can lead to suicidal behavior. The
disorder haunts an estimated 15 to 17 percent of soldiers returning from Iraq,
according to a study published by the New England Journal of Medicine in their
summer 2004 issue. The condition is also currently affecting an unknown number of
contractors who witnessed the horrors of war firsthand.
Little data is available on just how widespread the problem may be among civilian
workers. According to Dr. Charles Figley, Director of the Psychological Stress
Research Program at Florida State University and one of the country's most
prominent PTSD experts, the number of contractors suffering from the disorder will
likely remain an estimate.
"No one is counting, no one is noticing and no one cares," said Figley, a former
Marine and Vietnam veteran who believes that the risks contractors face are the
main reason that many of them earn high salaries.
Figley predicts that a PTSD study would document the danger to contractors and
force wages up even higher because fewer skilled Americans would be willing to
work in Iraq.
"These people are non-combatants in a combat environment, but I am sure there are
no studies about them." Figley adds. "Besides, it would be bad for business."
PTSD is bad for Baltazar as well.
"I wake up with nightmares, sometimes four times a night, sweating and yelling,"
he says.
It takes enormous courage to admit psychological baggage brought home from war,
but for contractors back in the US it is necessary for recovery.
Taken for dead
Like Baltazar, another KBR employee, Samuel Walker, says KBR denied him medical
leave after he was injured in the Camp Merez bombing. His only options at that
point were to quit or stay in Iraq. Walker, who now lives in Augusta, Georgia,
worked for over a year in Iraq as a fitness and recreation supervisor at the camp.
An Army veteran of 24 years, Walker joined KBR one month after retiring as a
Combat Communications Specialist. He recalls that he was eating French fries when
the explosion blasted through the mess tent.
"Body parts were flying all over and pieces of flesh flying in my face," Walker says.
When it was over, the former contractor was drenched in the blood of the victims
around him and rescue workers took him for dead. "I was so close to the bomber,"
he adds. "There was copper wire from the bomb embedded in my jacket."
Walker took a full blast to the side of his head and shrapnel pitted his body. But
when KBR medics treated him following the bombing, he says they merely rubbed
Vaseline on his burns and gave him Motrin for pain.
"For two days I told them my side was hurting but they said I would be okay, and
wouldn't give me medical leave," Walker says.
A week and a half later, like Baltazar, Walker quit and headed home to Houston.
Now he complains of ringing in his ears and migraine headaches. He's in physical
therapy for his neck, back and right knee. Walker also believes suffers from PTSD.
Questions about his work in Iraq, scenes from the TV news, even French fries, all
bring back the moment when the bomb flashed before him.
"I can't even walk into a restaurant without remembering the screaming, the
hollering, the yelling and everyone thinking I was dead," Walker says. With the
memories haunting him daily, Walker knows it's unlikely that he'll be able to
re-enter the workforce. In the meantime, he's waiting on his claim for disability
and medical bills.
"I haven't gotten one red cent from them," Walker says.
KBR responds
KBR insists that it is committed to ensuring its employees receive quality medical
treatment.
"KBR employees work side-by-side with the troops, and they do the jobs that, here
at home, are routine, such as planning and preparing meals," said KBR spokeswoman
Cathy Gist. "In a war zone, however, these jobs require courage, resolve and skill."
When asked if employees had been denied medical leaves after being injured at Camp
Merez, Gist answered indirectly. "As KBR's history of contracting for the U.S
military in remote environments continues, the company remains committed to
ensure[ing] its employees receive quality medical treatment and care, either
locally or by means of evacuation to a more advanced medical facility as dictated
by the nature of the situation, " she told CorpWatch,
Growing logjam
Like Baltazar and Walker, there are numerous former contractors waiting for
insurance companies to resolve claims related to war zones.
"Insurance companies are not used to doing this sort of thing in the numbers they
are coming in," says Washington, DC., attorney Mark Schaffer, who also represented
a Merez bombing victim who received medical leave, but only after bickering with
adjusters for three months. "Everyone is playing catch up."
Insurers are so behind that the pile-up has turned into a serious logjam within
the Department of Labor, which is responsible for overseeing all DBA claims.
Recently the department's administrative law judges, who preside over the most
contentious claims, adopted a policy to expedite cases involving the war in Iraq
and to pressure insurers to act more quickly.
"We're starting to get more cases, absolutely," says Richard D. Mills, District
Chief Judge for the Louisiana District Office, whose work includes claims from
Houston, KBR's headquarters. "We have been asked to finish up on some cases within
45 to 60 days."
As of May 10, death and injury claims related to the war in Iraq total 2,919,
according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Of those claims, insurers have disputed
1,538 -- more than half of the total -- and 821 remain unresolved.
These figures may not reflect the true number of workers eligible for benefits,
because many don't know they may be covered, let alone the full extent of their
benefits, says Schaffer.
"People are often stuck in Iraq, unaware of any entitlement," he observes, adding
that the prospect of continuing work outside the United States also tempts
employees to keep mum about their injuries. "Sometimes people are afraid to go to
the doctor because they will get sent home," adds Schaffer. "And if you don't stay
330 days, you lose your tax free salary. Everyone is over there to make money and
I haven't seen anyone turn down a paycheck yet."
Even U.S. citizens who have come home and families who have lost a husband or
father are often unfamiliar with their insurance coverage, says attorney Gary
Pitts. The Houston lawyer represents 35 clients with claims against KBR's insurer,
American International Group Inc. (AIG). A New York-based firm, AIG is widely
involved with business in Iraq and is presently under investigation by the
Securities and Exchange Commission for its accounting practices and for possible
stock fraud.
"AIG is dragging its heels and they only have three adjusters working the claims,
so they are swamped," says Pitts.
AIG declined comment. "We don't discuss clients with the press," company spokesman
Andy Silver told CorpWatch.
Pitts is representing Baltazar and Walker and believes that their stories speak
for themselves. "If anyone has a legitimate claim for post-traumatic stress and
disability, it's these guys. They were picking flesh off themselves."
Pitts fights to get weekly compensation for as long as an employee is off work,
medical bills and two-thirds of one's salary if a person is permanently out of
work when everything medically possible has been done. Families that lose their
primary income provider are also eligible for lifetime support as long as the
surviving spouse does not remarry, leading Pitts to estimate that life-long
disability claims for a widow and her family could top out at around $2 million.
"There's a lot of money to be saved by keeping people in the dark if you look at
it as a pure numbers game," says Pitts who, in addition to specializing in DBA, is
pursuing an ongoing international lawsuit against companies that helped Saddam
Hussein produce sarin and mustard gas. Noting that very few attorneys specialize
in DBA law because the fees are low and set by the Labor Department, he adds: "I
am afraid there are a bunch of widows in the hinterland who don't even know what
the DBA is, nor an attorney who practices it."
There are likely many workers around the world without knowledge about their
insurance coverage. Tens of thousands of workers from India, Pakistan, Turkey, the
Philippines and other countries have been recruited to work on military bases in
Iraq to perform blue-collar jobs that include food preparation, sanitation,
laundry services and construction work. They are often paid less than $1,000 a
month and work largely for subcontractors under other subcontractors working for
the prime U.S. funded contractor.
The General Accountability Office (GAO), the lead investigative arm of Congress,
recently concluded that it is impossible to accurately estimate the total number
of U.S. or foreign nationals working for U.S. government contracts in Iraq. The
GAO's investigation was prompted by concerns in Congress about insurance costs
that Iraq contractors are obligated to carry, which are then passed on to the
government.
"It is difficult to aggregate reliable data on the cost of DBA insurance due in
part to the large number of contractors and the multiple levels of subcontractors
performing work in Iraq," the GAO reported. "Lacking reliable aggregate data, we
were unable to calculate the total cost of DBA insurance to the government or the
impact of DBA insurance costs on reconstruction activities in Iraq."
Responding to the GAO's report, Labor Department official Victoria A. Lipnic said
that assuring all contracted employees have insurance coverage is an
"impossibility" without having someone in Iraq to "actually demand to see proof of
coverage for every level of subcontracted work."
In other words, the number of claims yet to come may be unfathomable. "The whole
legal and factual situation is just like the wild west," Pitts offers.
Only the personal stories are tangible, but Baltazar and Walker say KBR has never
called to find out how they are doing.
"I wanted to go back to work for them when I got well," Walker says. But he has
since changed his mind. "I don't like the way I have been treated," he adds.
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A reasonably just and well-ordered democratic society might be possible, and . . .
justice as fairness should have a special place among the political conceptions in
its political and social world. . . [M]any are prepared to accept the conclusion
that a just and well-ordered democratic society is not possible, and even regard
it as obvious. Isn't admitting it part of growing up, part of the inevitable loss
of innocence? But is this conclusion one we can so easily accept?
The answer we give to the question of whether a just democratic society is
possible and can be stable for the right reasons affects our background thoughts
and attitudes about the world as a whole. And it affects these thoughts and
attitudes before we come to actual politics, and limits or inspires how we take
part in it. . . If we take for granted as common knowledge that a just and
well-ordered democratic society is impossible, then the quality and tone of those
attitudes will reflect that knowledge. A cause of the fall of Weimar's
constitutional regime was that none of the traditional elites of Germany supported
its constitution or were willing to cooperate to make it work. They no longer
believed a decent liberal parliamentary regime was possible. Its time had past.
The regime fell first to a series of authoritarian cabinet governments from 1930
to 1932. When these were increasingly weakend by their lack of popular support,
President Hindenburg was finally persuaded to turn to Hitler, who had such support
and whom conservatives thought they could control.
~ John Rawls "Political Liberalism" pg. lx
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The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and the other corporate media
lobbies are so strong not merely because they are rich and give lots of money to
politicians' campaigns, though they are and they do. Far more importantly, the
corporate media control news and access to the media - something politicians
respect even more than money. This also means the media are in the enviable
position of being able to cover political debates over their own existence.
Consequently, ideas critical of corporate or commercial domination of the media
are basically 'verboten' in the commercial news media, and discussions of key laws
and regulations are restricted to the business pages and the trade press, where
they are regarded as issues of importance to investors, not as public issues of
importance to citizens.
The last thing the NAB or the corporate media want is for the American people to
get the crazy idea that they have a right to create whatever type of broadcasting
or media system they desire.
~Robert W. McChesney "Rich Media, Poor Democracy" p. 65
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Somebody came along and said, "Liberal means: soft on crime, soft on drugs, soft
on defense and we're gonna tax you back to the Stone Age because people shouldn't
have to go to work if they don't want to." And instead of saying, "Well, excuse
me, you right-wing, reactionary, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-education,
anti-choice, pro-gun, Leave it to Beaver trip back to the '50s," we cowered in the
corner and said, "Please, don't hurt me."
~ from an episode of 'The West Wing '