In Minnesota, Molnau is the second Republican department head to be grilled this summer after a spectacular public policy failure. In June Health Commissioner Dianne Mandernach, at times near tears, spent most of the day before the legislature being grilled about an incident for which she had already issued a written apology. Mandernach, a former Franciscan nun who was by some accounts an excellent hospital administrator before she was tapped by Pawlenty to become the health commissioner, was already well-known for her part in a health department fiasco involving the posting of bogus information on the department's website -- the claim that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer.
This time the issue was miners' lives. A 2006 study had suggested that workers in the northern Minnesota iron-mining industry had an extraordinarily high rate of the kind of cancer that you are prone to get if you spend your life working in mine dust. Specifically, the report noted that in the previous three years there had been thirty- five deaths from a rare asbestos-related cancer. The report was not released. Mandernach decided to sit on it in the name of "further studies." For one year the worker-management dynamic that, among other things, sets working conditions had to find its balance point without the union or the public knowing about the thirty-five dead miners.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070827/rubenstein
Add 35 cancer deaths to the deaths from the I-35 W bridge collapse d/t bad policy.
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