A Minnesota bus driver receives disability benefits because he has epilepsy. He also suffers from headaches, sleep apnea, asthma and high blood pressure. The driver and a medical professional agree that if the driver feels "loopy" he won't drive a commercial vehicle.

This scenario is from a new Government Accountability Office report, and it's every Minnesota motorist's worst worry. The GAO commissioned the study in anticipation of the Thursday hearing held by U.S. Rep. Jim Oberstar, D-Minn., chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.

The study found that about 563,000 people with commercial licenses have medical conditions that make them eligible for full federal benefits. In Minnesota, 5,500 of the 240,100 drivers with active commercial licenses received full federal disability payments, and 4,400 of the licenses were approved after the medical condition that led to the disability payments was detected.

The result, of course, is sadly tragic. Nationwide, 12 percent of commercial truck and bus crashes in 2006 were due to drivers being disabled by a physical ailment such as a heart attack or seizure.

You might expect calls for new laws and recommendations from the nation's capital. But the necessary safety guidelines already exist; they just haven't been implemented. The National Transportation Safety Board has described as "unacceptable" the response to eight safety recommendations it made in 2001 to better identify existing medical conditions and strengthen the medical review process to keep unfit drivers off the road.

The agency responsible for implementation, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, came under attack at last week's hearings. Oberstar claimed that the response by the agency's chief safety officer, Rose McMurray, was "begrudging and painstakingly slow," and that the deaths and injuries were on her conscience.

Oberstar is right. And it's refreshing for an elected official to dispense with decorum and get right to the heart of the matter.

The trucking industry should play a constructive role, too: Health privacy laws prohibit it from creating or maintaining the needed national database to cross-reference commercial drivers' licenses and health records, but it can use this rare media moment to push for more immediate implementation of these reforms.

In these partisan times, there's much to debate -- and to disagree about. But in this political season, this is a rare nonpartisan issue. Everyone can agree that public safety demands competent government followup.