Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, July 13, 1995                   TAG: 9507140039
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: JOAN CLAYBROOK
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long

HEALTH AND SAFETY

The Senate is considering a bill, S. 343, designed to ease the alleged burden that federal environmental, health and safety standards pose for business. Unfortunately, the cure is far worse than the disease. Had this bill been law two decades ago, life-saving advances that we now take for granted, such as the abolition of leaded gasoline, or the installation of seat belts and airbags in cars, would likely not have taken place.

S. 343 mandates an unworkable cost-benefit test for every new health and safety standard. Agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration already use cost-benefit analysis to evaluate proposed standards, but this bill carries it to an extreme, making cost-benefit a make-or-break criterion for deciding whether to issue a safety standard.

If one ignores the human reality of preventable injury, illness and death, it may sound reasonable to say that the benefits of a rule should outweigh its costs. But cost-benefit analysis is an emerging discipline, and a crude analytical tool. Benefits are much harder to document and quantify and than costs. Moreover, cost estimates generally come from industry, which consistently overstates the burden of federal safeguards. Who is to say what is the dollar value of a human life? Is it $200,000? $1 million? $5 million? The decision is obviously arbitrary, but can totally skew the outcome of a cost-benefit analysis.

By any measure, the current system has generated enormous benefits for the American people. A 1992 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration study estimated that federal auto safety standards alone saved nearly a quarter of a million lives and generated a net $410 billion gain to the economy between 1966 - when Congress created NHTSA - and 1990.

If Virginia still suffered under the national highway fatality rate from 1966, approximately 2,651 additional Virginians would die from preventable crash injuries this year.

The auto industry didn't implement these lifesaving standards out of the kindness of its heart. Although major automakers now advertise air bags prominently, the industry waged what the Supreme Court called ``the regulatory equivalent of war'' against the device for more than two decades.

While Detroit's lawyers sued and its lobbyists handed out PAC checks, 80,000 Americans died from crashes in which airbags would have saved their lives.

NHTSA projects that airbags soon will save 10,000 American lives per year, but the standard requiring airbags might not have passed S. 343's cost-benefit test. Automatic seat belts cost much less to install than do airbags, but are far less effective in preventing crash fatalities. Under S. 343, the auto industry could well have prevailed in court by arguing that automatic seat belts were the ``least cost alternative'' to meet federal passive-restraint requirements, particularly since Detroit persistently overestimated the cost of airbag installation by 100 percent and more.

For another example of the way S. 343 would endanger the lives of Virginians, consider the chemical compound ethylene oxide. Hospitals use ethylene oxide to sterilize equipment and thereby prevent infection in patients. However, the chemical is also very dangerous: Exposure causes cancer, miscarriages, neurological damage and genetic damage. For years, hospital workers have been exposed to ethylene oxide when they open sterilizers.

Under current law, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration can act to protect workers' health and mandate corrective engineering at companies that require workers to operate dangerous equipment.

OSHA required hospitals to limit worker exposure to ethylene oxide by retrofitting the sterilizers. The health-care industry argued that a cheaper alternative would have been to put workers in respirators. But respirators are cumbersome and uncomfortable, so workers often take them off. Moreover, they leak, providing imperfect protection even when used correctly. Under S. 343's inflexible one-size-fits-all cost-benefit test, industry likely would have prevailed.

The concept of assigning a dollar value to the suffering of a pregnant woman who miscarries because of exposure to ethylene oxide is morally repugnant. Yet S. 343 would compel OSHA to quantify the benefit of preventing miscarriage and correlate that to industry's estimate of the cost of limiting worker exposure to ethylene oxide. This is the nightmare that a rollback of federal safeguards will bring us.

Robb says he wants to help rid business of burdensome regulation, but S. 343 was written by and for the same industries that have fought vital health and safety protections for decades. Before he votes for S. 343, Robb should tell us exactly how many dollars he thinks a Virginian's life is worth. Better yet, he should cast a vote for the lives and health of his constituents.

Joan Claybrook is president of Public Citizen and former administrator of the National Highway Safety Administration.