The negative health and environmental impacts of our nation’s continued reliance on coal as a fuel source for power plants appropriately receives significant attention in the media and in public policy debates. However, the health consequences for those working in underground coal mines have received much less attention.

Early on the morning of Sept. 14, I joined several hundred fellow citizens, along with guests from Canada and the United Kingdom, inside Fort McHenry in Baltimore. We huddled in the chilly morning air in the dawn’s early light to remember the moment 200 years earlier when Francis Scott Key penned the first words of the poem that was to become our national anthem.

As part of the ongoing national effort by some in the business community and their allies in Congress to attack standards and safeguards, a report released today by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) provides a wildly exaggerated and unreliable estimate for the cost of federal rules in 2012. The report, prepared by economists W. Mark Crain and Nicole V.