Acts of Terrorism

When natural disasters strike, sometimes insurance covers the disaster… to a point… but often deductibles, exclusions (the “below sea level” damage exclusion in many policies) and policy limits leave victims high and dry. Acts of war or terrorism are often exclusions to property damage as well. Sometimes the government covers victims, often through loans that have to be repaid, and sometimes it does not. As the “almost didn’t pass any aid to Hurricane Sandy victims” mentality of an austerity-driven House suggests, such votes to support our faultless victims are anything but automatic.

The Boston Marathon victims now face a horror beyond their initial tragic losses and injuries. For those with health insurance, they face caps on various services, very long healing processes, many will need prosthetics and extended physical therapy and psychological counseling, but they will all have to deal with dollar and usage visitations. Very few policies cover such extended physical therapy or counseling requirements, and none really deal with reconfiguring residences to accommodate their rather dramatic change in being able to get around and use their home the same way. For those who can no longer work, those with disability insurance are the lucky ones, and social security for permanent disability is a difficult process with very small resulting payments.

For the initial hospital bills themselves, the local Boston hospitals are still mulling over whether or how to charge for their services but have indicted that their decisions will be determined “case-by-case.” After the Aurora, Colorado shooting, the hospitals there waived charges. The average cost for shooting victims is around $50,000, but the entire loss of limbs with bombing victims will possibly generate a significant multiple of that amount. The matter gets more complicated with victims with insurance coverage and domiciles in other states… or even other countries. For those without such coverage, the result can be even more devastating. It will interesting to see how Massachusetts, with some of the most extensive government-controlled coverage of any state, will deal with these issues.

Donations are a seriously obvious way to deal with such crises, and American hearts are big here, but like most tragic events whose consequences drag on for years, the giving moments are very much linked in time to the events that caused the tragic injuries. Several Websites for individual victims have appeared. The Mayor of Boston and the Governor of Massachusetts set up the One Fund Boston (onefundboston.org) that quickly raised $10 million in charitable donations to deal with three fatalities and 170 injuries, 50 of which were particularly serious. Attorney Ken Feinberg, who has run such funds before, was engaged to run the fund.

“For Mr. Feinberg, whom city and state officials asked to administer the One Fund Boston, the first task is to determine how much money is going to be available through it. Most donations typically arrive in the first month after a disaster, he said, adding that the fund-raising window should ideally be brief. ‘I’m a big believer, in most of these programs, that the fund should be a very small duration,’ Mr. Feinberg said in a phone interview. ‘Because you’ve got to begin to get the money out the door to the people who really need it, and you’ve got to know how much you’re going to distribute.’

The thornier job, though, will be figuring out who qualifies for the funds and how much each victim who survived — as well as the families of the three who died — should receive…

“Mr. Feinberg said that he would seek input from victims and their families before deciding on a formula. For victims of the Virginia Tech shooting, he said, compensation amounts were based on how long they were in the hospital. After the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colo., victims who were paralyzed or suffered traumatic brain injuries received just as much as the families of those who died. ‘You can’t pay everyone the same if someone has a broken ankle versus a brain injury,’ he said. ‘There’s got to be some sliding scale.’” New York Times, April 22^nd.

For now, Americans and those around the world must open their hearts and wallets to the victims. But one particularly harsh truth comes out of this analysis: while this is a rare and isolated horror in the United States, it is a way of life in places where bombs, bullets, missiles and artillery shells are a part of daily life. We just cannot stop caring for those who are hurt.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is at moments like this we show our best attributes as human beings.