A yearlong investigation, Breathless and Burdened exposed how eminent doctors and lawyers, working at the behest of the coal industry, have helped deny sick and dying miners the meager benefits and affordable medical care they need to survive. The first installment revealed how the coal industry’s go-to law firm has employed cutthroat tactics to defeat miners’ claims for decades. The firm, Jackson Kelly PLLC, has a long record of withholding evidence of black lung; the result sometimes has been devastating for miners. Part two showed how thousands of opinions by doctors at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions have helped the coal industry defeat miners’ claims. These doctors consistently have provided opinions crucial to defeating miners’ claims, even as evidence proved their methods unsound and their conclusions wrong. ABC News produced a segment for “World News” and a 10-minute, in-depth investigation for “Nightline” about the work of the doctors at Johns Hopkins. The third story laid bare the strategy that the coal industry has used for more than a century in an attempt to limit its liabilities – a strategy that is playing out again as the industry and its allies try to deny evidence of an emerging form of the disease.
