MESSAGE BOARD
HAGGLING OVER HEALTHCARE (By M. Freeman)
If you’re not one of the widely estimated 47 million citizens of the United States who can’t afford health insurance, don’t even begin to think you’re securely out of harm’s way…especially if your insurance carrier determines you need an “experimental” procedure to save your life.
That’s what the family of Nataline Sarkisyan discovered last December, when the 17-year-old girl was refused insurance coverage from CIGNA and passed away while awaiting a critical liver transplant. Ironically, a team of doctors at the UCLA Medical Center recommended Sarkisyan, who battled Leukemia for three years, receive the liver transplant, but carrier CIGNA initially dragged its feet by self-determining it was an “experimental” procedure not covered in her mother’s policy.
From the beginning of Sarkisyan’s dilemma, UCLA and other leading transplant physicians noted that the planned procedure was not experimental and that a majority of patients in her situation would have a 65 percent chance of surviving at least six months or more. After considerable growing public outrage, CIGNA relented, only to have Sarkisyan die of complications while waiting the interim.
The Sarkisyan tragedy, while just one example of the millions of insured and non-insured Americans who greatly fear even the slightest prospect of a monumental out-of-the-pocket medical expense, illustrates the mounting national anxiety over the cost of healthcare and insurance coverage in this country. For many Americans, skyrocketing healthcare costs mean benefit drop-offs or spiking premiums.
While not exactly regarded as a healthcare advocate, President Bush nonetheless tepidly suggested moving all Americans out of employer-based health insurance and into individual-market plans, arguing that more choices for consumers will lead to lower premiums. In California, individual insurance premiums do seem to be increasing at a slower rate than small-group market premiums, according to the study on the Web site of The Journal of Health Affairs. But the trade-off for lower premiums is steep reductions in benefits, the study found.
Between 2003 and 2006, premiums for employees of small businesses rose 53 percent from $250 to $382, while premiums in the individual market increased only 23 percent to $259, the study found. However, individual-market policies paid 75 percent of medical costs on average in 2003 but only 55 percent in 2006. In contrast, small-group policies retained their actuarial value, paying for roughly 83 percent of medical expenses across the period.
What's more, individual-market enrollees faced much higher cost-sharing in 2006 than their small-group-market counterparts. The average deductible in the individual-market was a robust $2,136, more than SIX times the size of the average small-group-market deductible of $348.
When an American must weigh the risk-reward ratio of individual versus small-group coverage, it’s really a “pick-your-poison” dilemma.
Aside from slapping wrists, levying small fines (a few hundred thousand-dollar fines are a tip in the bucket for insurance carriers) and threatening new regulation of the health insurance industry, state and federal legislators – who benefit greatly from generous insurance industry political contributions – lack the needed ethical impetus to push a consensus national healthcare plan through Congress.
In other words, it's not surprising that we’re still on our own and DENIED a “national safety net.”
POP GOES THE SUBPRIME BALLOON (By M. Freeman)
To borrow from Yogi Berra, it l ooks like “It’s déjà vu all over again” when it comes to mortgage loan industry’s chits being called in.
Over the last couple of months, Citigroup Inc. has penciled in a $12.5 billion write-down ($10 billion from bad home loans), Washington Mutual reported its first quarterly loss ($1.87 billion) since 1997 and Countrywide Financial is selling its ever-deflating $4 billion mortgage portfolio to Bank of America — making the growing “sub-prime” lending crisis SMELL more and more like the Savings & Loan scandal/fiasco of the 1980s. With big business-friendly Washington politicos throwing wet kisses and opening the regulatory taps, not-so civic-minded S&L executives — like the late Charles Keating (of Lincoln Savings fame) and Neil Bush (yes, of that Bush family and Silverado S&L infamy) — ran a conga line of bad mortgages, business loans and general embezzlement. A bailout of over 1,000 S&Ls rang up a $160.1 billion grand total ($124.6 billion of which the U.S. government pilfered from taxpayers’ pockets), according to the U.S. General Accounting Office as of July 1996.
Flash-forward to 2008: With 7.5 million of first-lien subprime mortgage loans written (estimated at a staggering $1.3 trillion total, per MSNBC.com, March 2007), the delinquency/ foreclosure rate is 21% nationwide currently (says U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Jan. 10, 2008) and foreclosure actions on 1.03 million housing units since July 2006 threatens to make it the mother of all economic sinkholes. Even with Pres. Bush recently announcing a freeze on adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) and a new “FHA-Secure” refinancing program (eligible to ONLY to “current, non-delinquent” homeowners), these are mere temporary plugs in a dam with millions of fissures threatening to crack open – representing an average 450,000 overleveraged homeowners (hoping to stay “current”) with resetting ARM mortgages set to balloon each quarter of this year.
Things could get worse, much worse, especially with an economy now said to be hitting another recession…fear of the dreaded “D” word (as in “depression”) is even weighing heavily on some Wall Streeters, who've just witnessed the Dow wipe out all of its 2007 gains since the start of this year. And the subprime fiasco could easily be ten times more costly than the S&L scandal, when it is all said and done (maybe ten years or more from now).
It’s ironic, though, that some economists claim that government policy actually ENCOURAGED the development of the subprime debacle through legislation creating the Community Reinvestment Act, which they say forces banks to lend to otherwise less creditworthy consumers. Economist Robert Kuttner has criticized the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act as contributing to the subprime meltdown. The Glass-Steagall wall was devised to prevent a repeat of the 1920s scams, in which banks made speculative investments, turned the debts into securities, and sold them off to unsuspecting investors with the blessing of the bank.
Short of asking taxpayers to foot the bill on the latest bank lending crisis, couldn’t the federal government just take out its own version of a “balloon mortgage?”
TOP FRAUDULENT LENDING SCAMS (Source: U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department)
- A lender or investor tells you that they are your only chance of getting a loan or owning a home. You should be able to take your time to shop around and compare prices and houses.
- The house you are buying costs a lot more than other homes in the neighborhood, but isn't any bigger or better.
- You are asked to sign a sales contract or loan documents that are blank or that contain information which is not true.
- You are told that the Federal Housing Administration insurance protects you against property defects or loan fraud - it does not.
- The cost or loan terms at closing are not what you agreed to.
- You are told that refinancing can solve your credit or money problems.
- You are told that you can only get a good deal on a home improvement if you finance it with a particular lender.
HEALTHCARE INSURANCE RESOURCES:
GENERAL INTEREST RESOURCES:
HOME LOAN/MORTAGE RESOURCES:
___________________
Shopping for a Mortgage? Your Application May Trigger Competing Offers
Cancellation of Private Mortgage Insurance: Federal Law May Save You Hundreds of Dollars Each Year
___________________
HAGGLING OVER HEALTHCARE (By M. Freeman)
If you’re not one of the widely estimated 47 million citizens of the United States who can’t afford health insurance, don’t even begin to think you’re securely out of harm’s way…especially if your insurance carrier determines you need an “experimental” procedure to save your life.
That’s what the family of Nataline Sarkisyan discovered last December, when the 17-year-old girl was refused insurance coverage from CIGNA and passed away while awaiting a critical liver transplant. Ironically, a team of doctors at the UCLA Medical Center recommended Sarkisyan, who battled Leukemia for three years, receive the liver transplant, but carrier CIGNA initially dragged its feet by self-determining it was an “experimental” procedure not covered in her mother’s policy.
From the beginning of Sarkisyan’s dilemma, UCLA and other leading transplant physicians noted that the planned procedure was not experimental and that a majority of patients in her situation would have a 65 percent chance of surviving at least six months or more. After considerable growing public outrage, CIGNA relented, only to have Sarkisyan die of complications while waiting the interim.
The Sarkisyan tragedy, while just one example of the millions of insured and non-insured Americans who greatly fear even the slightest prospect of a monumental out-of-the-pocket medical expense, illustrates the mounting national anxiety over the cost of healthcare and insurance coverage in this country. For many Americans, skyrocketing healthcare costs mean benefit drop-offs or spiking premiums.
While not exactly regarded as a healthcare advocate, President Bush nonetheless tepidly suggested moving all Americans out of employer-based health insurance and into individual-market plans, arguing that more choices for consumers will lead to lower premiums. In California, individual insurance premiums do seem to be increasing at a slower rate than small-group market premiums, according to the study on the Web site of The Journal of Health Affairs. But the trade-off for lower premiums is steep reductions in benefits, the study found.
Between 2003 and 2006, premiums for employees of small businesses rose 53 percent from $250 to $382, while premiums in the individual market increased only 23 percent to $259, the study found. However, individual-market policies paid 75 percent of medical costs on average in 2003 but only 55 percent in 2006. In contrast, small-group policies retained their actuarial value, paying for roughly 83 percent of medical expenses across the period.
What's more, individual-market enrollees faced much higher cost-sharing in 2006 than their small-group-market counterparts. The average deductible in the individual-market was a robust $2,136, more than SIX times the size of the average small-group-market deductible of $348.
When an American must weigh the risk-reward ratio of individual versus small-group coverage, it’s really a “pick-your-poison” dilemma.
Aside from slapping wrists, levying small fines (a few hundred thousand-dollar fines are a tip in the bucket for insurance carriers) and threatening new regulation of the health insurance industry, state and federal legislators – who benefit greatly from generous insurance industry political contributions – lack the needed ethical impetus to push a consensus national healthcare plan through Congress.
In other words, it's not surprising that we’re still on our own and DENIED a “national safety net.”
POP GOES THE SUBPRIME BALLOON (By M. Freeman)
To borrow from Yogi Berra, it l ooks like “It’s déjà vu all over again” when it comes to mortgage loan industry’s chits being called in.
Over the last couple of months, Citigroup Inc. has penciled in a $12.5 billion write-down ($10 billion from bad home loans), Washington Mutual reported its first quarterly loss ($1.87 billion) since 1997 and Countrywide Financial is selling its ever-deflating $4 billion mortgage portfolio to Bank of America — making the growing “sub-prime” lending crisis SMELL more and more like the Savings & Loan scandal/fiasco of the 1980s. With big business-friendly Washington politicos throwing wet kisses and opening the regulatory taps, not-so civic-minded S&L executives — like the late Charles Keating (of Lincoln Savings fame) and Neil Bush (yes, of that Bush family and Silverado S&L infamy) — ran a conga line of bad mortgages, business loans and general embezzlement. A bailout of over 1,000 S&Ls rang up a $160.1 billion grand total ($124.6 billion of which the U.S. government pilfered from taxpayers’ pockets), according to the U.S. General Accounting Office as of July 1996.
Flash-forward to 2008: With 7.5 million of first-lien subprime mortgage loans written (estimated at a staggering $1.3 trillion total, per MSNBC.com, March 2007), the delinquency/ foreclosure rate is 21% nationwide currently (says U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Jan. 10, 2008) and foreclosure actions on 1.03 million housing units since July 2006 threatens to make it the mother of all economic sinkholes. Even with Pres. Bush recently announcing a freeze on adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) and a new “FHA-Secure” refinancing program (eligible to ONLY to “current, non-delinquent” homeowners), these are mere temporary plugs in a dam with millions of fissures threatening to crack open – representing an average 450,000 overleveraged homeowners (hoping to stay “current”) with resetting ARM mortgages set to balloon each quarter of this year.
Things could get worse, much worse, especially with an economy now said to be hitting another recession…fear of the dreaded “D” word (as in “depression”) is even weighing heavily on some Wall Streeters, who've just witnessed the Dow wipe out all of its 2007 gains since the start of this year. And the subprime fiasco could easily be ten times more costly than the S&L scandal, when it is all said and done (maybe ten years or more from now).
It’s ironic, though, that some economists claim that government policy actually ENCOURAGED the development of the subprime debacle through legislation creating the Community Reinvestment Act, which they say forces banks to lend to otherwise less creditworthy consumers. Economist Robert Kuttner has criticized the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act as contributing to the subprime meltdown. The Glass-Steagall wall was devised to prevent a repeat of the 1920s scams, in which banks made speculative investments, turned the debts into securities, and sold them off to unsuspecting investors with the blessing of the bank.
Short of asking taxpayers to foot the bill on the latest bank lending crisis, couldn’t the federal government just take out its own version of a “balloon mortgage?”
TOP FRAUDULENT LENDING SCAMS (Source: U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department)
- A lender or investor tells you that they are your only chance of getting a loan or owning a home. You should be able to take your time to shop around and compare prices and houses.
- The house you are buying costs a lot more than other homes in the neighborhood, but isn't any bigger or better.
- You are asked to sign a sales contract or loan documents that are blank or that contain information which is not true.
- You are told that the Federal Housing Administration insurance protects you against property defects or loan fraud - it does not.
- The cost or loan terms at closing are not what you agreed to.
- You are told that refinancing can solve your credit or money problems.
- You are told that you can only get a good deal on a home improvement if you finance it with a particular lender.
HEALTHCARE INSURANCE RESOURCES:
GENERAL INTEREST RESOURCES:
HOME LOAN/MORTAGE RESOURCES:
___________________
Shopping for a Mortgage? Your Application May Trigger Competing Offers
Cancellation of Private Mortgage Insurance: Federal Law May Save You Hundreds of Dollars Each Year
___________________