GAO Trucker Medical Report Opens Pandora's Box

Monday's AP story, titled "Deadly Tolls: Sick truckers causing fatal wrecks", caught my attention as I usually read truck driver articles. This article, however, touched a nerve that has been being continually irritated by the irresponsible media campaign against truck drivers. This time, however, it also pinched an adjacent nerve on driver health and finished off the trio of insults with an extreme example of slanted reporting, half-truths and pandering to specific groups.

Hope Yen is a political writer. This is a political article, disguised as news. Three of the five incidents cited in the article are NOT about truck drivers, but bus drivers. In fact, one is a small passenger van incident and its questionable if the van driver even had to follow DOT medical requirements. Why, then, didn't the article title reflect that? The simple answer is that truck drivers are a popular profession to vilify. Bus drivers are not.

As for poor driver health, why is it no investigative reporter wants to look too deeply into the reasons for this poor health we all supposedly suffer from? This is more politics. Absolutely no reporter is interested in doing an article on the reasons so many drivers suffer from poor health. No coverage can be expected of the terrible working conditions many long-haul drivers are subjected to year in and year out; the impossibly poor diet choices available, the lack of opportunities for safe exercise, the constant exposure to variable whole-body vibration -well over the European limits for such activity-and its attendant health consequences, the job-required irregular wake/sleep cycles that lead to overweight, heart disease, high blood pressure and sleep apnea. Are we supposed to surmise from this article and others like it that truck drivers purposely destroy their health then deceive the medical examiners simply so we can go out and kill people? Do we purposely choose conditions that lead to high death rates a full fifteen years before the general population? And why is it most studies of driver health are funded or contracted by the American Transportation Research Institute, an arm of the ATA?

The short answer is, leading players in the freight transportation field are well-aware of the problems the current configuration of the job causes. Conditions-and pay-have gotten steadily worse ever since de-regulation of the trucking industry. Drivers have paid for the lowering of freight costs and the productivity gains touted with both their health and their paychecks. Government is complicit in this deception of many levels. The entire house of cards was trembling after the courts ruled FMCSA Hours of Service revised rules unacceptable as they did not address driver safety and health. Government promptly provided funding for studies that was immediately snapped up by the ATRI. As the fox guarding the henhouse, the ATRI's "scientific data" is highly suspect-particularly when all future data is derived from unpublished studies and based on the ATRI's industry-serving conclusions.

A current case in point is the supposed high-incidence of sleep apnea among truck drivers. The stated 28% positive testing rate leaves some vital information out of the methodology of the study used; careful digging through supporting scholarly literature shows that the 28% was NOT a percentage of randomly-tested drivers, but instead a testing of a selected group of drivers who responded to a sleep apnea questionnaire and heavily weighted toward drivers whose answers indicated possible sleep apnea. If anything, the study should show that sleep apnea screening questionnaires are unreliable in determining more than a casual relationship to actual sleep apnea as the selection group should have showed closer to 60% positive testing for sleep apnea. That is NOT how it has been played by the ATA, member carriers, FMCSA or in the news media. Instead, we are subjected to constant media and industry abuse for a condition that, no doubt, is over diagnosed, applies to a wide segment of society and often is caused by current industry working conditions.

OSHA has been conspicuously absent in trucking. They have confined their observations to the dock and to the stationary truck-there is little ergonomic concern for the actual particulars of the job. Due to the high injury incidence rate, long-haul carriers provide some of the poorest excuses for health insurance-if they provide it at all. Most family doctors do not understand the true scope of the job. Most drivers cannot get home on a regular schedule to make and keep doctors appointments and often, following doctor's recommendations means the unemployment line. Carriers, for their part, are concerned with keeping costs down and bad publicity to a minimum. Other ATRI studies for the benefit of the industry have shown that long-haul drivers are most likely to be injured after seven years service and if they are over fifty years old. Due to the transportation exemption within the Fair Wage and Hour Act, carriers use the per-mile pay system to forcibly attrition long-tenure drivers off their payroll and their liability. Carriers are attempting to influence changing DOT medical requirements to do the dirty deed for them by failing to qualify experienced drivers for further service, thus using the regulations to trim their payrolls of drivers at risk for expensive health conditions. Working conditions causing the health problems are never address and continue to get worse. When the trucking economy goes south, older experienced drivers are the first ones let go, with health broken and future job prospects limited to none. This is a national disgrace. Where is the reporting on that?

The future of trucking, then, is being configured to favor only young, inexperienced drivers for seven years or less. In truth, many older drivers probably SHOULD be medically dis-abled, but the industry should be forced to pay the cost, not society, the drivers or their families. Faced with absorbing the high cost of actual care for their injured, ill and disabled drivers, the industry might be more amenable to returning to some of the old union rules that required hourly pay, mandated breaks throughout the day and a good, solid health insurance plan to pay the reduced medical costs. Sick truck drivers is what society gets for allowing working conditions as close to slavery in America as faulty laws allow. Our truckers deserve better.