Sept. 11 responders who are not yet in the 9/11 treatment program could be facing a new roadblock, according to a letter from the federal government that warns lawmakers the number of slots available for ill people is nearing its maximum.
The letter, sent Wednesday by Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, was required by the 2015 law that made the World Trade Center Health Program permanent.
Under the law, enrollment was capped at 25,000 responders and 25,000 survivors. The secretary was required to warn lawmakers when signups hit 20,000 in either category.
According to the message from Azar, that number is being reached early this month for responders.
While it doesn’t affect anyone getting treatment now, Azar said that sometime after late 2020, the enrollment cap would be hit, and no new people would be allowed in.
“Based on current projections, the WTC health Program anticipates that the number of newly enrolled responders will reach 80 percent of the statutory enrollment numerical limitation in early September of 2019, and the full numerical limitation will be met 25,000 numerical limitation will be met sometime between October 2020 and February 2021,” Azar’s letter says.
He adds that the 20,000-enrollment warning trigger for survivors will not be hit for several years.
It will be up to Congress to fix the situation by either raising the caps or eliminating them.
A joint statement from a half dozen members of Congress involved in the legislation called the problem a “technical issue that can be easily fixed” and won’t hurt anyone already in the program before the caps are hit.
“We are working now to make sure no future applicants are impacted,” the statement said, though it did not offer a specific cure.
It added that Congress included the trigger in the original 9/11 bill to make sure lawmakers would have time to respond if enrollments surged, as they have.
“We built in this noticing requirement for when the program reached 80% of the new enrollee caps so that Congress would have more than enough time to act,” said the statement. “This is the program working as intended.”
A fix to remove or increase the caps seems likely to pass Congress easily after the recent high-profile push to permanently extend the separate 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, which brought dying responders and comedian Jon Stewart to Capitol Hill.
That struggle wound up with legislators uniting more on any big-ticket spending proposal than they have in years, passing permanent compensation with just a handful of opponents.
Upgrading the limits on the treatment program should be easier since it would carry no direct budgetary impact. Funding for the effort has already been specified in law through 2025, and will rise with inflation after that.
Funding could eventually become an issue if rising enrollments collide with increasing medical costs somewhere down the road, but medical costs are hard to guess five and 10 years in the future, especially for numbers of responders and survivors that are changing.
News of the treatment limits came as another reminder of 9/11 surfaced Thursday. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee announced it would hold a field hearing on Monday at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum on current national security challenges.
Three past Homeland Security secretaries from the Bush and Obama administrations are expected to testify.
