dojN000890.xml

dojN000890.xml

born-digital

email

yes

no

2001-12-25

Tuesday, December 25, 2001 11:39 AM
comments for injured survivors

As a survivor of the World Trade Center, I have several comments regarding the payments from the fund to decedents and survivors, as follows:

Presumed Non-Economic Loss: In Section 401.46 Determination of Presumed Non-Economic Losses for Claimants who Suffered Physical Harm, you state that you will be relying upon the non-economic losses of decedents and adjusting the losses based on the victim's physical harm. It is unclear from the wording what you mean by this. Do you intend to take a fraction of the decedent's non-economic settlement, qualitatively viewing a survivor's injury as a fraction of a death? Or do you intend to consider that survivors from high floors had the same or more gruesome experiences than many of those who did not survive, regardless of the extent of the injuries? As a survivor from the 78th floor of 2 WTC, I saw most die from the immediate impact of the plane and had no "pain & suffering", while others suffered whether or not they were able to egress from the tower to safety and survive. I do not think it would be fair to reduce the survivors' non-economic loss to a fraction of the decedents' non-economic loss. In any event, you should make your intent clear.

Reduction in Settlement from Consumption: Step 5 of the calculation of economic loss reduces the settlement to account for the "consumption factor", which is an estimate of income that the decedent personally would have consumed during his or her work-life. Obviously, this reduction should not apply to survivors, who will need to continue to consume. In fact, their consumption might be greater than if they would not have suffered their injuries. For example, I cannot drive now and might not be able to do so in the future, which will result in additional costs for car services. Cooking and cleaning is now difficult and I now need help cleaning and am incurring additional consumption costs in using processed foods, take out and restaurants than I otherwise would have.

Schedule for Injured: In the 'Presumed Economic and Non-Economic Loss Tables" found on your wed-site, you very nicely present schedules so that the decedent's family can get an estimate of what they would be entitled to if they use the fund and relinquish their rights to litigate. However, you do not have such a schedule for survivors. This is unfair, since you are asking them to relinquish their right to litigate without providing them with some indication of their potential settlement. Either you should provide schedules as you have done for decedents or you should remove the waiver of rights clause for survivors until an estimate of their settlement is available.



I hope you consider my comments seriously, since it affects those who were injured. I do not believe that you have thought through the plight of the physically injured as thoroughly as you have for the decedents, since there are fewer of us.



I also have a few minor comments on the calculation of economic loss from "Presumed Economic and Non-Economic Loss Tables" obtained from the fund web-site:


Step One: This step indicates that an average of three-year pre-tax income including employer benefits such as medical coverage is used. I would like to point out that 401-K contributions should be included in this calculation as well.


Step Two: Increases in wages are arbitrarily determined based on age of the decedent or survivor. For example, you use 5.1 percent for people in the age range of 31 to 50. I think this unfairly views the workforce as uniform. I am a very hard worker and have received salary increases that are higher than the average in my company. Also, I have already missed the promotion opportunity to manage my group due to my injuries, which might have resulted in a higher title, bonus and salary than a 5.1% increase per annum.


Step Three: This calculation assumes that individuals will continue to retire at their current patterns. Many people have been retiring early due to favorable economic conditions and demographics. However, because of the aging of the population, it is unreasonable to assume that this trend will continue, since in the future people will obviously will have to continue to work longer than they have in the past. Perhaps a more reasonable assumption is their normal retirement age under social security. For example, my normal retirement age would be age 66 and 2 months.


Step Four: No comments.


Step Five: My comments on this are indicated above.

Thank you for your time and consideration. If you would like to discuss any of my points further, please call me at .

Individual Comment

2001-12-25