Please Help Me Go on Living Ground Zero volunteer no health insurance

Omaha Steve

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Mon Aug-28-06 03:21 PM
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Please Help Me Go on Living Ground Zero volunteer no health insurance

Edited on Mon Aug-28-06 03:34 PM by Omaha Steve

http://www.usmwf.org/vito_valenti.htm

NYCOSH Newswatch

Daily News editorial - Please Help Me Go on Living

August 10, 2006

http://www.nydailynews.com/08-10-2006/news/story/442219p-372474c.html

A man's life is at stake. His name is Vito Valenti. On Sept. 11 he was caught in the maelstrom and stayed at Ground Zero as a volunteer to help in the frantic rescue and recovery operation. And today he is dying.

He is 42 years old.

He cannot work.

He has no pension.

He has no health insurance.

He has no money for medications.

His lungs are being destroyed by pulmonary fibrosis.

His only hope is a double lung transplant, but he cannot afford even the oxygen he needs to make it day by suffocating day.

Only through the good graces of a generous medical supply company is he being sustained with the fundamental requirement of life: breath.

"After hearing that he was a 9/11 volunteer, we decided to donate the oxygen," said Ed Brown, sales representative for Homecare Concepts in Farmingdale, L.I.

Someone in power must help Vito Valenti, for he will die without it.

Numerous officials have responded to this series of editorials by pledging to aid the forgotten victims of 9/11. Today, they can be of critical service.

Mayor Bloomberg, Gov. Pataki and every elected and health official who let the 9/11 epidemic expand unaddressed ought to knock this morning on Valenti's door. Inside the upstairs apartment of a two-family house at 1320 A St. in Elmont, L.I., they would meet a man who personifies how seriously ill some Ground Zero responders are. And they would see, in the most extreme way, that many are being denied proper assistance.

Like thousands of others, Valenti is at the mercy of a workers' compensation system that is ill-suited, if not hostile, to reimbursing them for lost wages and picking up health care costs. New York's compensation law was written to cover standard accidents, such as falling off a ladder, and illnesses directly related to a specific occupation, such as repetitive stress nerve damage among meat cutters. The law was not designed for illnesses that emerge over time from the inhalation of unprecedented amounts of toxins by 40,000 workers with disparate jobs.

As a result, Valenti is among a vast legion who are barred from filing claims because they realize they are sick more than two years after 9/11, the time limit for starting a case. His only hope rests in legislation that would extend the filing period for9/11 responders. Such a bill is on Pataki's desk. So Valenti lives on $1,430 a month in Social Security and cannot afford drugs to treat his illness and prepare him for a transplant.

"He is dying," said Dr. Maria Padilla, medical director of Mount Sinai Medical Center's lung transplantation program, who began seeing Valenti in April 2005. "Unless he can get coverage for his medications and get ready for a transplant, there is no hope."

Valenti is a divorced father of two. He lives with his 74-year-old father, who is battling heart problems and cancer, and he lost his mother to cancer in February. For more than a decade, Valenti worked as a lunch aide in a Queens middle school and then became a grievance representative for his union, Local 372, with half his $60,000 salary paid by the union and half by the school system.

Valenti's office was at 125 Barclay St., directly behind the World Trade Center, making him witness to the full horrors of 9/11 and positioning him to serve as a volunteer. Over the next two days, in the thick of a toxic cloud, he distributed water and supplies and remembers escorting a dazed and bleeding firefighter to a triage nurse. He slept on West St. with a roll of paper towels as his pillow.

"The smell of death was everywhere," Valenti said. "It was like hell."

The nightmare took a toll. Diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder, Valenti went on paid leave for six months and unpaid leave for four. Because he filed on time for PTSD, workers' comp reimbursed the Education Department for his sick pay.

By February 2002, Valenti was also coughing. Over the coming months, his respiratory distress worsened, leading eventually to a diagnosis of pulmonary fibrosis in March 2004. Fibrosis is a scarring of the lungs that prevents the body from oxygenating the blood. It is a form of interstitial lung disease, the illness that took the lives of Firefighter Stephen Johnson, Police Officer James Godbee, Detective James Zadroga and telephone worker Mark DeBiase.

Valenti exhausted his health benefits in December 2005, making it impossible for him to afford more than a dozen medications. The company that provided his oxygen supply took its equipment back.

Lacking his medications, Valenti gave up on the lung transplant program. Two weeks ago, he was admitted to Winthrop-University Hospital in Mineola in the throes of a respiratory failure. Doctors stabilized him, gave him a 30-day supply of medicine, and a nurse secured free oxygen for him from Homecare Concepts.

Many city workers who were disabled after responding to 9/11 are eligible for special three-quarter-pay pensions under legislation enacted in 2005. The law says their illnesses are presumed to have been caused by the event. But here, too, Valenti is out in the cold.

First, he had declined to join the city retirement system before9/11, a decision that may make him ineligible for the special pension. Second, he would need to prove that he served at Ground Zero for 40 hours. His only witness, union Vice President Santos Crespo, said he believes Valenti served for the required time. But Crespo lost track of Valenti in the chaos and so can't swear to it.

State Sen. Michael Balboni's office is trying to figure out whether Valenti is entitled to a disability pension. The law is unclear, leaving Valenti to wait for the end of a long, bureaucratic process, when he has no time to wait. The life expectancy of people with his disease may be as little as three years. Much of that time is already gone.

"I'm begging for someone to help me," Valenti said. "I do not want to die."

He shouldn't have to beg.

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Jonathan Bennett
Public Affairs Director, New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health
116 John Street, Suite 604, New York NY 10038
jbennett@nycosh.org
Tel: 212-227-6440 ext. 14
Fax: 212-227-9854

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