“The reality of approximate justice, swiftly and surely delivered, is vastly preferable to the illusion of precise justice,” Tribe told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, chief sponsor of the Fairness in Asbestos Injury Resolution, or FAIR act, called the hearing a critical step in reaching a politically feasible solution to a problem that the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly asked Congress to resolve, and urged a swift compromise to get the bill passed before support for the initiative dies.

The bill would establish a $108 billion trust fund, to be paid into by defendant companies and their insurers, which would disburse compensation to people who have become ill due to workplace asbestos. Payments would be made over a 25-year period. The largest payment would be about three-quarters of a million dollars – relatively small compared to other multi-million dollar litigation judgments.

Hatch and other advocates of the trust fund legislation see it as the best way to ensure that those who have been actually harmed by asbestos get some kind of compensation. They’ve been critical of recent huge awards courts have awarded to claimants who have been exposed to asbestos, but haven’t actually fallen ill. Opponents say the bill lets corporations whose workers were exposed to asbestos get off too lightly by limiting their liability and that the medical criteria for establishing a claim are too stringent, besides the potential bureaucratic costs to manage the trust fund being too high. Some also complain that the bill does not include provisions to provide reimbursement to people who have been exposed to asbestos outside the workplace.

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., said he would not support the bill unless a provision were added to provide compensation to spouses and children of workers who may have been harmed secondhand by the deadly asbestos dust.

Senator Patty Murray, D-Wash., went beyond the debate, saying Congress should consider outright banning the manufacture and sale of asbestos-containing products that are still in use in the United States, such as roofing and floor coverings.

Although members of the Judiciary Committee remained far apart on the legislation, Hatch said he was determined to seek a formal committee vote, perhaps as soon as next week.

Litigation to recover damages for workplace exposure to asbestos has been a political issue for nearly 20 years. During that time, according to a study conducted by the RAND Corporation, over 600,000 people have filed asbestos-related lawsuits. Many of the claimants are people who have not developed health problems as a result of their exposure.

More than 6,000 companies, from nearly every industry in the United States, have been named as defendants, and 56 have gone bankrupt in paying damages. More than half of the damages recovered in the mass of lawsuits have gone to pay court costs and lawyers’ fees, RAND said, and 65 percent of damages were won by still-healthy plaintiffs.

Last month, the Hartford Financial Services group blamed a wave of layoffs on the costs of asbestos claims.

Tribe said he feared that under the current system, severely injured plaintiffs may have to go through years of waiting to get court-awarded damages, which may never come if the defendant companies go bankrupt paying claims. Hatch and other backers of the trust-fund plan agreed.