9/11 Victim Compensation Fund is Running Out of Money

 

By Dominique Mosbergen

In a “devastating” blow to the victims of the 9/11 attacks and their families, the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund says it will be slashing its payouts to claimants by as much as 70 percent because of its rapidly depleting cash pool.

The $7.3 billion fund, which was established in 2011 to compensate victims impacted by toxic exposure at the sites of the 9/11 attacks, revealed Friday that it had just $2 billion left in its coffers. According to the fund’s administrator, Rupa Bhattacharyya, this amount will need to cover almost 20,000 currently pending claims, as well as thousands of additional claims expected to be filed before the expiration of the fund in December 2020.

To provide some perspective on how thinly spread the fund now is, Bhattacharyya noted in a statement that the VCF’s first $5 billion was divvied up between about 21,000 claims.

Because of the lack of resources, the fund said any pending claims filed before Feb. 1, 2019, would be paid out at 50 percent of their original value. Those received after this date will be paid at just 30 percent.

Bhattacharyya expressed deep regret that such reductions had to be made but said there had been no way for the fund to accurately predict how many claims it would receive.

She told NPR that the number of claims had sharply increased since 2015. She said the long latency period for some cancers may be a reason behind the surge.

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Source: The Huffington Post