The Affordable Care Act has been a catalyst for a net increase of 16.9 million Americans gaining health insurance in the last two years via Medicaid expansion and subsidized private coverage with evenmore people accessing employer-sponsored plans. A new study by the RAND Corp., which looked at a sampling of 1,600 [...]
Reported by Forbes.com 1 hour ago.
ACA Triggers Net Gain Of 16.9 Million More Insured Americans
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Texas Lawmakers: No Health Insurance Abortion Coverage, Even For Rape Victims
Texas Lawmakers: No Health Insurance Abortion Coverage, Even For Rape VictimsTexas Lawmakers: No Health Insurance Abortion Coverage, Even For Rape Victims
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The Republican-controlled Texas Senate voted yesterday 21-10 to remove health insurance coverage from automatically including abortion coverage, even for rape victims.
Senate Bill 575 would apply to private health insurance plans and plans bought via the Obamacare website.
Republican state Sen. Larry Taylor of Texas claimed his bill would mean that people who oppose abortion would not have to pay for other people's abortions. Instead, women would have to buy abortion coverage separately as an add-on rider, noted The Dallas Morning News.
Taylor stated, "They’ll just have to come up with another means to pay for it other than having all the people across the state of Texas who buy insurance being forced to pay for something they don’t believe in or agree with."
Taylor failed to mention that Texans are forced to financially support policies every day that they don’t believe in or agree with.
While the bill would provide coverage for abortion in cases where the mother's life was in danger or to stop a “substantial impairment of a major bodily function," it would not include rape victims or women who have unsustainable pregnancies.
The Houston Chronicle reports that the bill now moves to the Texas House "where a committee has already passed a similar measure that would ban abortion coverage."
Michigan passed a similar law in 2013 that was deemed "rape insurance," reported Talking Points Memo.
However, there is an apparent legal problem with women having to purchase additional "riders" for abortion coverage.
The Daily Kos quotes the Detroit News:
In fact, the state "opt-out" rider law clashes with provisions of the Affordable Care Act, which outlaws both separate riders and any government subsidy of abortion. Under federal law, insurers cannot offer a rider to a standard, inclusive policy. And the new state law bars insurers from including elective abortion coverage in any policy, on or off the exchange.
Sources: The Dallas Morning News, Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos, Houston Chronicle
Image Credit: Brian Stansberry
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OV in Depth: Reported by Opposing Views 1 hour ago.
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Nearly 17 Million Americans Covered Under Obamacare
Nearly 17 million Americans got health insurance under the Affordable Care Act after the new insurance exchanges opened up, a new analysis finds.
Reported by msnbc.com 38 minutes ago.
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How Obamacare Changed Health Insurance -- Maybe
There's no debate that Obamacare has expanded health coverage in America — but one big question has been by how many people. And RAND researchers think they've got the answer: 16.9 million. Nearly 22.8 million people have gained health insurance since the Affordable Care Act's first enrollment period kicked off in October 2013, [...]
Reported by Forbes.com 23 hours ago.
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Travisoft Announces Webinar to Preview What's New and Necessary in COBRA Administration
Webinar: Preview EDI 834 Transactions and Other Must-Haves for COBRA Administration
Houston, TX (PRWEB) May 07, 2015
Travisoft, the inventor and leader of COBRA software solutions, invites benefit administrators to see what is new in COBRA administration. Join a live, one-on-one webinar hosted by Travisoft to learn more about EDI-834 transactions, as well as to preview the latest in COBRA administration. See why these tools are becoming necessary in the industry, and how you can implement them in your cobra software.
In this webinar, “Seamless Communication with EDI 834’s and More Advanced Options for Time Management,” see how to seamlessly and effectively communicate with insurance carriers using customizable EDI 834 transactions via your COBRA administration system. These transactions have become the preferred method of carriers for accepting health insurance benefits enrollment information; however, each insurance carrier requires a slightly different EDI template. Learn the do’s and don’ts of customizing EDI files based on each insurance carrier’s preferences.
The webinar will also feature additional new COBRA must-haves for your COBRA software, such as expanded importing options; flexibility in payment timelines; and more robust reporting features. These functions will soon become necessary for COBRA administrators to speed up administration time and automate processes.
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) 834 transactions have been in place since the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996, and are a structured way to transmit data between computer systems, governed by standards that are extremely important for medical claims. Not only does the correct information need to be in the files, but they also need to be customized based on each carrier’s preferences. Travisoft’s EDI Customization and Generation Module allows users to build, modify, generate, and save templates per carrier within the COBRA administration software.
Travisoft invented COBRA administration software in 1986 and has been the leading provider ever since. Travisoft was and remains dedicated to being First in Benefit Solutions, and First in Service. The company’s cloud-based platform, T-COBRAWEB, allows COBRA administrators to provide unparalleled, customized COBRA administration service using a scalable, user-friendly, and fully automated COBRA solution. Travisoft continues to lead the way in COBRA solutions, by just recently launching two new software editions: SimpliCOBRA starting at $1,000.00 and a new edition specially designed for to host Benefit Broker's clients.
For more information on Travisoft’s COBRA administration solutions, please visit travisoft.com Reported by PRWeb 15 hours ago.
Houston, TX (PRWEB) May 07, 2015
Travisoft, the inventor and leader of COBRA software solutions, invites benefit administrators to see what is new in COBRA administration. Join a live, one-on-one webinar hosted by Travisoft to learn more about EDI-834 transactions, as well as to preview the latest in COBRA administration. See why these tools are becoming necessary in the industry, and how you can implement them in your cobra software.
In this webinar, “Seamless Communication with EDI 834’s and More Advanced Options for Time Management,” see how to seamlessly and effectively communicate with insurance carriers using customizable EDI 834 transactions via your COBRA administration system. These transactions have become the preferred method of carriers for accepting health insurance benefits enrollment information; however, each insurance carrier requires a slightly different EDI template. Learn the do’s and don’ts of customizing EDI files based on each insurance carrier’s preferences.
The webinar will also feature additional new COBRA must-haves for your COBRA software, such as expanded importing options; flexibility in payment timelines; and more robust reporting features. These functions will soon become necessary for COBRA administrators to speed up administration time and automate processes.
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) 834 transactions have been in place since the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996, and are a structured way to transmit data between computer systems, governed by standards that are extremely important for medical claims. Not only does the correct information need to be in the files, but they also need to be customized based on each carrier’s preferences. Travisoft’s EDI Customization and Generation Module allows users to build, modify, generate, and save templates per carrier within the COBRA administration software.
Travisoft invented COBRA administration software in 1986 and has been the leading provider ever since. Travisoft was and remains dedicated to being First in Benefit Solutions, and First in Service. The company’s cloud-based platform, T-COBRAWEB, allows COBRA administrators to provide unparalleled, customized COBRA administration service using a scalable, user-friendly, and fully automated COBRA solution. Travisoft continues to lead the way in COBRA solutions, by just recently launching two new software editions: SimpliCOBRA starting at $1,000.00 and a new edition specially designed for to host Benefit Broker's clients.
For more information on Travisoft’s COBRA administration solutions, please visit travisoft.com Reported by PRWeb 15 hours ago.
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The Marriage Cure
(Photo: CSA-Plastock/iStock)
Several authors long associated with the idea that marriage is a prime cure for inequality have published a manifesto, condensed in The Washington Monthly. The new wrinkle is an alliance between marriage traditionalists and gay-rights activists. The Marriage Opportunity Council, a spin-off of the Institute for American Values, hopes that by adding same-sex unions to the definition of marriage, they can unite progressives and conservatives in a cause to promote marriage generally. The basic premise of the essay and the broader campaign is that marriage provides economic as well as emotional security; that it’s good for children to grow up in two-parent families; and that a class gap has opened up in the incidence of marriage, which widens inequality and harms the poor, especially the children of the poor. A “growing class-based marriage divide threatens all of us,” the several authors, led by longtime marriage advocate David Blankenhorn, write. “It endangers the very foundations of a broadly middle-class society.”
There is much that is controversial in the premise of the statement. One tricky question is cause and effect. Does marriage produce improved incomes, or do higher incomes increase the possibility of successful marriages? The evidence that marriage, in and of itself, is better for children is inconclusive. There is plenty of evidence, however, that toxic marriages can do more harm to children than divorces or single parenthood. It’s not at all clear that public policy is competent to promote marriage, even if that were a goal that could unite liberals and conservatives. And by emphasizing marriage per se, the writers ignore marriage-neutral measures that could really help children and parents, such as more supportive work-family policies, more comprehensive child care options, and higher earnings for working people. Progressives would do better to fight for policies that aid the broad spectrum of kids and families.
But that set of policies, unlike the supposed left-right appeal of marriage, bitterly divides conservatives and liberals. Fiscal conservatives don’t want to spend the money, and “traditional values” conservatives don’t want the state involved in any aspect of child-rearing. The debate goes back several decades, and a pro-marriage manifesto that papers over these political differences is a distraction, at best.
*THERE WAS A TIME* when Democrats saw the logic of embracing family diversity. In the 1980s, the Democratic Party platform included commitments like making federal programs “more sensitive to the needs of the family, in all its diverse forms” and barbs like, “in Ronald Reagan’s vision of America, there are no single-parent families.” As political scientists Laurel Elder and Steven Greene have traced in their book, The Politics of Parenthood: Causes and Consequences of the Politicization and Polarization of the American Family, the Democrats’ family rhetoric began to veer to the right under Bill Clinton in the 1990s. Since then, nontraditional families have been without a political champion, at least in presidential politics.
Politicians have increasingly turned to sticks and carrots to prod people into traditional nuclear families. Conservatives have long worried that giving too much financial assistance to single women might somehow “disincentivize” them from marrying, even though research suggests that those who feel economically secure are more likely to get married, and stay married. Many centrist Democrats, capitulating to the frames pushed by the Republican Party, have backed policies that support poor children but not their poor unmarried parents, which is contradictory, to say the least. It’s hard to imagine thriving kids without thriving parents.
If there were policy interventions that would lead people to feel secure enough to marry, as the Marriage Opportunity Council hopes, that would be great. Stable and loving marriages are to be cherished, and evidence suggests they are salutary for children. But the government is just not very good at promoting such marriages. And poverty corrodes them. Single parenthood and divorce have continued to increase under conservative rule as well as liberal. Today, more than 40 percent of American children are born outside of marriage.
That’s why making it easier for parents, married or not, to manage their responsibilities is so critical. Economic policies like universal child care, paid family leave, paid sick leave, living wages, child allowances, rent subsidies, affordable health care, and quality public transportation are examples of the types of reforms that we know would dramatically improve the lives of millions of families.
Some analysts and policy-makers do understand this. Earlier this year, Shawn Fremstad and Melissa Boteach of the Center for American Progress released a new report entitled “Valuing All Our Families.” The authors show why it’s misguided to focus on family structure without also considering family strength and family stability. Introducing this notion of the “Three S’s”—stability, strength, and structure—they offer us an opportunity to move away from the simplistic binary of one- versus two-parent households, which does little to illuminate how these parents and children actually fare.
The Marriage Opportunity Council argues that “no politically plausible amount of government transfers” can fill the gap necessary to curb inequality. But suggesting that two-parent, married households are remedies for inequality is suspect—15.2 million impoverished children live in two-parent, married households. Relatedly, children of married parents in the United States are way poorer than children in married households in other countries. Such statements are also too dismissive of other needed solutions. Demos policy analyst Matt Bruenig has shown how restructuring our child tax benefits could create a far more equitable and efficient system to support families. Reinvesting in our public transit systems would allow parents to save money on transportation costs, reduce long commutes, and have more time to spend with their children. Expanding affordable health insurance and building more subsidized housing would reduce the economic burden weighing on parents—which often acts as a detriment to their physical health, their parenting abilities, and their interpersonal relationship skills. Let’s fix our distribution policies first (including ridding the tax code of marriage penalties), and then perhaps we’ll be in a better place to think about family structure.
It’s time to get beyond the misplaced fear that if we help unmarried families too much we might somehow be “legitimating” their lifestyle and discouraging marriage. Progressive economic policies should be understood as marriage-neutral. They would help single parents and their kids, as well as married parents and their kids. Indeed, by relieving the levels of work-family stress, we would actually be increasing the odds that couples will stay together.
*FROM A POLITICAL* standpoint, Democrats have much to gain from developing a more inclusive family narrative—one that speaks to both married couples and to single individuals. Importantly, supporting nontraditional families does not mean ignoring the needs of married couples. It’s not an either/or choice on policy; rather, what’s needed is recognition that we need not champion marriage above all else in order to support strong families.
Unmarried women represent a rapidly growing Democratic constituency: In 2012, they comprised 25.6 percent of the voting-eligible population, an 8.3 percent increase from 2008. In contrast, married women increased their share of the voting-eligible population during this time by 1 percent. Pew Research Center reported in 2014 that a record share of Americans have never married—20 percent of adults ages 25 and older. In 1960, only about 10 percent of adults in this age range had never married.
While a 7–percentage point gender gap was present in the 2008 election (56 percent of women went for Obama compared to 49 percent of men), the “marriage gap” was far greater. Fully 70 percent of unmarried women went for Obama compared to 29 percent for John McCain. In battleground states like New Hampshire, unmarried women voted for Obama by margins of 38 points. It is clear that learning how to better appeal to unmarried women carries immense electoral advantages.
But, of course, there are different kinds of unmarried women. Some have never been married. Some are divorced. Some are under 30. Some are widowed. Some are mothers. And survey researchers have not been great about sorting out all these subgroup details over time.
“Unmarried women under 55 is a new category,” says pollster Celinda Lake. “There have always been lots of widows, and widows have a very high [voting] participation rate. So ideally, you want to break this out by under and over 55, but people often tend to conflate the whole category.”
Lake argues that the rise of this Democratic-leaning, under-55, unmarried cohort can be characterized by three main factors. The first is that those who are not married tend to be less religious, and very religious people tend to be more conservative. Second, unmarried women tend to be more economically marginal. They have only one income to rely on, they tend to work in lower-wage positions, and they are often paid less than men for equal work. Lastly, for more than a decade, polls and surveys have shown that women are more likely to see a greater role for government to play when it comes to fixing society’s problems, while men tend to prefer as little government as possible. “Greater secularism, greater economic marginality, and greater perception of a need for government role—all those things are highly correlated with voting Democratic,” says Lake.
So we know that unmarried women break heavily for Democrats, when they vote at all. The problem for Democrats is that while unmarried women vote heavily in presidential years, their turnout drops sharply in off-year elections. A recent Democracy Corps poll found that unmarried women were the most pessimistic about the country’s future when compared to all the other Democratic base groups—53 percent said they felt the country was headed on the wrong track. This suggests that many unmarried women are skeptical that politics and government can provide much practical help anytime soon, and that the appeal of Democrats—and of politics in general—needs to be more potent if this key constituency is to be activated to its full potential.
The 2014 election marked the Democrats’ most serious attempt yet to target unmarried women. For this cycle, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the official campaign arm of House Democrats, unveiled a new sophisticated voter model designed to help candidates identify single women and craft messages to reach them. They called it the ROSIE model, an acronym that stands for “Re-engaging Our Sisters in Elections.”
And yet even with innovations like the ROSIE model, and new research conducted by groups like the Voter Participation Center, Democrats were unable to articulate a compelling message that could connect to the frustration these voters felt. “Microtargeting isn’t a silver bullet by itself,” says Michael Podhorzer, the political director at the AFL-CIO. “Democrats have to stand for things.”
In the future, support for such “things” could mean standing unapologetically for policies that would help all families achieve stability and strength, regardless of marital status. But crafting an inclusive messaging strategy that represents all families is not something candidates have been particularly good at.
“Whether it was Bill Clinton speaking of the ‘soccer mom’ or George W. Bush appealing to the ‘Security Mom,’” says Susan Carroll, a senior scholar at Rutgers’s Center for American Women and Politics, “candidates have too often reduced women’s interests to their roles as mothers, and more often than not, in a caricature of a white suburban mother.”
Encouragingly, the political obstacles that impede inclusive, pro-family goals appear more surmountable than they have in previous decades. “As women have taken on far more roles in our society and people appreciate what that means, there’s a much greater sense of public responsibility for things like child care and paid family leave,” says Nancy Duff Campbell, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center. In other words, an ever-growing number of women in the labor market means an increasing number of people who understand why things need to change.
*WE CAN AGREE* that everyone should have the opportunity to marry. New research from the Council on Contemporary Families suggests that boosting incomes may be one way to boost marriage rates because, paradoxically, marriage is often seen as something people must be able to “afford” to do. “There is a clear economic bar to marriage and to the extent people cannot meet that bar they are less inclined to marry,” said sociologist Shannon Cavanagh, in an interview with NBC News. However, apart from income levels, individuals across the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development—34 relatively affluent countries that commit themselves to democratic principles and a market economy—are also simply less interested in marriage than they were several decades ago. And despite millions of federal dollars spent on unsuccessful marriage promotion programs, we still don’t really know if it’s possible to reverse this trend.
It’s fine for the Marriage Opportunity Council to continue researching ways to break down barriers to marriage, and it’s good that some marriage traditionalists now support same-sex marriage. However, this effort should not stop the rest of us from adopting a narrative and a set of policies to champion the family in all its diverse forms. Doing so is imperative for children, important for income inequality, and critical for the Democratic Party’s political future. Reported by The American Prospect 15 hours ago.
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Residents react to Inspira reportedly claiming hospital can't make money in Woodbury
Inspira Woodbury spent $6.72 million on care to patients who do not have health insurance, or otherwise cannot pay their bill, in 2013. During that same year, the hospital President and CEO Eileen Cardile received a total compensation package worth $486,584.
Reported by NJ.com 11 hours ago.
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Why you need renter's insurance
*Why you need renter's insurance*
The share of all households in the United States that rent rather than own is on the rise, yet many people have either never heard of renter’s insurance or ignore it. According to a 2014 survey by the Insurance Information Institute, 95 percent of homeowners had homeowner’s insurance but only 37 percent of renters had renter’s insurance. In other words, over 60 percent of renters had no basic protection for their possessions.
That’s a sobering statistic. It’s easy to be blasé when most rental leases make the renter responsible only for what happens “from the paint in.” After all, you may think, building problems may make your life uncomfortable but the repair bill ultimately goes to the landlord. In fact, while your landlord’s insurance covers damage to the building, it doesn’t cover your belongings.
*If you own your home, read our homeowner's insurance buying guide.*
Consider the costs of water damage caused by a neighbor’s leaky bathtub or the smoke from a grease fire. Even if you don’t think your possessions are valuable, imagine the implications of losing and having to replace everything you own. “You try to replace your bed, mattress, comforter, sheets, pillow—we’re talking a lot of money here,” says Jeanne Salvatore, senior vice president of the Insurance Information Institute. “If you have to re-buy everything, it’s going to cost thousands, even for the most bare-bones apartment.”
Renter’s insurance provides financial protection against the loss or destruction of possessions from fire or smoke, vandalism, theft, explosion, windstorm and water damage (not including floods). If the individual is unable to live in his or her apartment, the policy also covers the cost of living in a comparable apartment for a certain amount of time. Because in most cases, renter’s insurance covers only the value of someone's belongings, not the building they’re housed in, the cost is relatively inexpensive: The average annual premium is less than $200.
Most major companies offer renter’s insurance policies. You may even get a discount by bundling it with your auto insurance policy.
Renter’s insurance is a given for millenials: 72% of householders under age 30 live in rental housing, according to the National Multihousing Council. But it also provides a safety net for the increasing number of older people who are moving from the suburbs into the city or selling the house they raised their family in and testing out a new lifestyle elsewhere. Moreover, all of the 18- to 24-year-old renters and those 65 and older who had insurance needed to use it at some point, according to Rent.com.
For most Americans, buying auto and health insurance is a no-brainer. Renter’s insurance should be, too. “Absolutely, positively, purchase renter’s’ insurance,” says Salvatore. “It’s an essential.”
— Catherine Fredman
*Consumer Reports has no relationship with any advertisers on this website. Copyright © 2006-2015 Consumers Union of U.S.*
*Subscribe now!*
Subscribe to *ConsumerReports.org* for expert Ratings, buying advice and reliability on hundreds of products.
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Reported by Consumer Reports 7 hours ago.
The share of all households in the United States that rent rather than own is on the rise, yet many people have either never heard of renter’s insurance or ignore it. According to a 2014 survey by the Insurance Information Institute, 95 percent of homeowners had homeowner’s insurance but only 37 percent of renters had renter’s insurance. In other words, over 60 percent of renters had no basic protection for their possessions.
That’s a sobering statistic. It’s easy to be blasé when most rental leases make the renter responsible only for what happens “from the paint in.” After all, you may think, building problems may make your life uncomfortable but the repair bill ultimately goes to the landlord. In fact, while your landlord’s insurance covers damage to the building, it doesn’t cover your belongings.
*If you own your home, read our homeowner's insurance buying guide.*
Consider the costs of water damage caused by a neighbor’s leaky bathtub or the smoke from a grease fire. Even if you don’t think your possessions are valuable, imagine the implications of losing and having to replace everything you own. “You try to replace your bed, mattress, comforter, sheets, pillow—we’re talking a lot of money here,” says Jeanne Salvatore, senior vice president of the Insurance Information Institute. “If you have to re-buy everything, it’s going to cost thousands, even for the most bare-bones apartment.”
Renter’s insurance provides financial protection against the loss or destruction of possessions from fire or smoke, vandalism, theft, explosion, windstorm and water damage (not including floods). If the individual is unable to live in his or her apartment, the policy also covers the cost of living in a comparable apartment for a certain amount of time. Because in most cases, renter’s insurance covers only the value of someone's belongings, not the building they’re housed in, the cost is relatively inexpensive: The average annual premium is less than $200.
Most major companies offer renter’s insurance policies. You may even get a discount by bundling it with your auto insurance policy.
Renter’s insurance is a given for millenials: 72% of householders under age 30 live in rental housing, according to the National Multihousing Council. But it also provides a safety net for the increasing number of older people who are moving from the suburbs into the city or selling the house they raised their family in and testing out a new lifestyle elsewhere. Moreover, all of the 18- to 24-year-old renters and those 65 and older who had insurance needed to use it at some point, according to Rent.com.
For most Americans, buying auto and health insurance is a no-brainer. Renter’s insurance should be, too. “Absolutely, positively, purchase renter’s’ insurance,” says Salvatore. “It’s an essential.”
— Catherine Fredman
*Consumer Reports has no relationship with any advertisers on this website. Copyright © 2006-2015 Consumers Union of U.S.*
*Subscribe now!*
Subscribe to *ConsumerReports.org* for expert Ratings, buying advice and reliability on hundreds of products.
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Update your feed preferences
Reported by Consumer Reports 7 hours ago.
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The Five Nearly Impossible Challenges for Bernie Sanders and His Supporters
Based strictly upon his agenda, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) would be a groundbreaking president, and in a general vote-your-conscience sense, he's definitely worthy of support from the activist left. Here are just a few of the reasons why: he supports single-payer health care; he supports higher tax rates on the wealthiest one percent, especially when it comes to paying for wars; he'd prioritize global warming as the number one crisis of our time; and he's arguably the most vocal supporter of the middle class since FDR. In many ways, Sanders is a dream candidate...
...On paper.
This is the big "but." Supporting Sanders for the Democratic nomination is sort of like ordering a new-fangled As-Seen-On-TV exercise contraption. Making a conscious decision to get into better shape is admirable. However, there are about 10,000 subsequent steps that need to occur after handing over your credit card number. Either you'll do all of the impossibly necessary work to look like the fitness models in the infomercial, or you'll have a medieval clothes rack festooning the corner of your bedroom until the big yard sale.
Likewise, there are five impossible challenges facing Sanders and his people.
*1) Raising money.* Evidently, Sanders raised over a million dollars immediately after his announcement, with the average donation not exceeding $43. That's significant and respectable. The question is whether he has the continuously generous donors to outspend not just Hillary Clinton, but the other potential contenders including the John Edwards of this election, Martin O'Malley, who's getting ready to announce soon. In order to do so, will Sanders accept support from big-money donors and various 501(c)3 organizations, along with the accompanying dark money? And how will his supporters take the news? It'll be impossible for Sanders to make a serious dent in the delegate count without going there.
*2) Calibrating expectations.* On Sunday's This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Sanders made it clear that we shouldn't underestimate his chances, given his track record of victories so far. Frankly, however, I don't think he seriously, deep down, expects to win. Historically, candidates like Sanders (see also Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, Al Sharpton, Mike Gravel and even Ross Perot) never really believe they can win.
If that's the case, what's the point in activating massive grassroots support and fundraising for a no-win candidate? The obvious answer, and one which I personally like, is the idea of nudging the Overton Window leftward. Sanders has the rhetorical chops to move the debate leftward, making some of his ideas more palatable to voters, and that's a good thing, given how rightward the Window has been pulled by the Tea Party and Bush-era, post-9/11 politics. The caveat here, though, is for his supporters to calibrate expectations to match this goal, rather blindly and singularly expecting victory because if too many supporters fail to steel themselves for the inevitable, disillusionment and subsequently more Hillary Derangement Syndrome will ensue and that's terrible news for the Democratic nominee in the general.*3) Superdelegates and winning the nomination.* Remember 2008? In the Democratic nomination fracas between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, 20 percent of the necessary delegates required for the nomination came from unpledged "superdelegates" who had enough power to throw a tight nomination battle in either direction, or worse, to a contested convention. Does an Independent-turned-Democrat have the superdelegate support of someone like Clinton or O'Malley, knowing that each candidate's been shmoozing party apparatchiks for many, many years.
2008 taught us that the Democratic nomination isn't solely decided by voters. Without superdelegate support, Sanders is entering the race with a 20 percent deficit. Unless Sanders runs a flawless campaign and reassures enough superdelegates that he's capable of defeating the Republican nominee, he doesn't have a shot.
*4) Beating the Republican ticket.* With an increasingly polarized electorate, Sanders would have to acquire massive support from the center-left and especially the middle in order to come close to beating the GOP nominee. While it's true the Republicans have mostly abandoned the middle for the Tea Party and libertarian extremists in the party, it doesn't necessarily mean a far-left socialist can grab up the centrist votes.
There's no doubt that a Sanders general election campaign could generate plenty of Democratic support, from both the left and center-left, but how would moderate undecided voters swing: toward a crumpled socialist or a familiar GOP name like Bush, or a young newcomer like Scott Walker who feels familiar? Bottom line: Sanders has much farther to go in order to win the middle than the GOP ticket.
*5) Governing and compromising his agenda.* Let's say Sanders successfully runs the gauntlet and a series of events transpire that impossibly thrusts him into the White House. What then? More than anything else, Sanders' coattails would have to be longer than Florida in order to carry with him enough congressional seats to support his agenda. And even if perchance the Democrats pull a Godzilla-sized rabbit out of a Jeb Bush-sized hat and win majorities in both chambers, would there be enough votes from moderate Democrats to support colossal tax hikes on the rich or a single-payer health insurance plan to replace Obamacare? Highly, highly, highly doubtful.
Remember how long Obamacare was hashed out in Congress in order to win the support of blue-dog Democrats like Ben Nelson and Max Baucus? Nearly a year, as I recall, and a pantload of compromise, including the soul-crushing abandonment of the public option. Now imagine trying to get blue-dog Democratic Senator X to vote for single-payer. Honestly, it wouldn't even come to that because the Senate Republicans would filibuster the hell out of the entire Sanders agenda, much less single-payer. I think most liberals would agree, at least when compared to Sanders, that Obama has governed as a center-left Democrat and occasionally a centrist Republican. How has the GOP reacted? Like mental patients. Insert, now, an actual socialist agenda into that equation and stir.
In order for Sanders to get anything passed he'd absolutely be forced to significantly compromise his agenda and cut deals with the Republicans. How might he compromise? First and foremost, his unwavering support for Israel as well as his votes against closing Guantanamo might indicate two areas that'd be on the table in negotiations with Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. But just imagine the apoplexy from his far-left supporters if he did. And that's just the tip of the iceberg in a divided government.
How would Sanders get his would-be Treasury Secretary Robert Reich (who's a fantastic choice, by the way) confirmed by a Republican Senate? He'd have to give them something they'd want, of course, and even then it'd be crap-shoot. Would the far-left be comfortable with a trade? Reich for, say, a moderate Supreme Court nominee? Or Reich for Keystone XL? Or Reich for ANWAR? Based on the last six-plus years and the far-left's ongoing perfectionist freakout over Obama's compromises, not to mention President Clinton's compromises in the 1990s, many heads would surely explode.
Bottom line: while Sanders' agenda is attractive, it's wise to calculate whether it's at all practical. Sadly and regrettably, I'd argue that none of it is, given the political climate today -- unless Sanders and his supporters are willing to compromise, and I don't think his supporters in particular have the capacity for compromise. Not even close, given recent history.
There's a definite nobility in voting for candidates who best align with our personal values, even if they have no chance of winning. But our convictions in the voting booth are equally if not less important as having a realistic outlook on the bigger picture, and voters of both parties would do well to seriously consider these factors. If a vote for a longshot candidate with a longshot agenda triggers an explosive and perhaps irreparable blowback against your values, was it really worth it? Meanwhile, the left ought to provide Sanders just enough leverage to inject his message into the mainstream. At the end of the day, isn't that the point?_______________Subscribe for free to the Bob & Chez Show podcast with special thanks to Tatiana Mendez.
Cross-posted at The Daily Banter.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 7 hours ago.
...On paper.
This is the big "but." Supporting Sanders for the Democratic nomination is sort of like ordering a new-fangled As-Seen-On-TV exercise contraption. Making a conscious decision to get into better shape is admirable. However, there are about 10,000 subsequent steps that need to occur after handing over your credit card number. Either you'll do all of the impossibly necessary work to look like the fitness models in the infomercial, or you'll have a medieval clothes rack festooning the corner of your bedroom until the big yard sale.
Likewise, there are five impossible challenges facing Sanders and his people.
*1) Raising money.* Evidently, Sanders raised over a million dollars immediately after his announcement, with the average donation not exceeding $43. That's significant and respectable. The question is whether he has the continuously generous donors to outspend not just Hillary Clinton, but the other potential contenders including the John Edwards of this election, Martin O'Malley, who's getting ready to announce soon. In order to do so, will Sanders accept support from big-money donors and various 501(c)3 organizations, along with the accompanying dark money? And how will his supporters take the news? It'll be impossible for Sanders to make a serious dent in the delegate count without going there.
*2) Calibrating expectations.* On Sunday's This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Sanders made it clear that we shouldn't underestimate his chances, given his track record of victories so far. Frankly, however, I don't think he seriously, deep down, expects to win. Historically, candidates like Sanders (see also Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, Al Sharpton, Mike Gravel and even Ross Perot) never really believe they can win.
If that's the case, what's the point in activating massive grassroots support and fundraising for a no-win candidate? The obvious answer, and one which I personally like, is the idea of nudging the Overton Window leftward. Sanders has the rhetorical chops to move the debate leftward, making some of his ideas more palatable to voters, and that's a good thing, given how rightward the Window has been pulled by the Tea Party and Bush-era, post-9/11 politics. The caveat here, though, is for his supporters to calibrate expectations to match this goal, rather blindly and singularly expecting victory because if too many supporters fail to steel themselves for the inevitable, disillusionment and subsequently more Hillary Derangement Syndrome will ensue and that's terrible news for the Democratic nominee in the general.*3) Superdelegates and winning the nomination.* Remember 2008? In the Democratic nomination fracas between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, 20 percent of the necessary delegates required for the nomination came from unpledged "superdelegates" who had enough power to throw a tight nomination battle in either direction, or worse, to a contested convention. Does an Independent-turned-Democrat have the superdelegate support of someone like Clinton or O'Malley, knowing that each candidate's been shmoozing party apparatchiks for many, many years.
2008 taught us that the Democratic nomination isn't solely decided by voters. Without superdelegate support, Sanders is entering the race with a 20 percent deficit. Unless Sanders runs a flawless campaign and reassures enough superdelegates that he's capable of defeating the Republican nominee, he doesn't have a shot.
*4) Beating the Republican ticket.* With an increasingly polarized electorate, Sanders would have to acquire massive support from the center-left and especially the middle in order to come close to beating the GOP nominee. While it's true the Republicans have mostly abandoned the middle for the Tea Party and libertarian extremists in the party, it doesn't necessarily mean a far-left socialist can grab up the centrist votes.
There's no doubt that a Sanders general election campaign could generate plenty of Democratic support, from both the left and center-left, but how would moderate undecided voters swing: toward a crumpled socialist or a familiar GOP name like Bush, or a young newcomer like Scott Walker who feels familiar? Bottom line: Sanders has much farther to go in order to win the middle than the GOP ticket.
*5) Governing and compromising his agenda.* Let's say Sanders successfully runs the gauntlet and a series of events transpire that impossibly thrusts him into the White House. What then? More than anything else, Sanders' coattails would have to be longer than Florida in order to carry with him enough congressional seats to support his agenda. And even if perchance the Democrats pull a Godzilla-sized rabbit out of a Jeb Bush-sized hat and win majorities in both chambers, would there be enough votes from moderate Democrats to support colossal tax hikes on the rich or a single-payer health insurance plan to replace Obamacare? Highly, highly, highly doubtful.
Remember how long Obamacare was hashed out in Congress in order to win the support of blue-dog Democrats like Ben Nelson and Max Baucus? Nearly a year, as I recall, and a pantload of compromise, including the soul-crushing abandonment of the public option. Now imagine trying to get blue-dog Democratic Senator X to vote for single-payer. Honestly, it wouldn't even come to that because the Senate Republicans would filibuster the hell out of the entire Sanders agenda, much less single-payer. I think most liberals would agree, at least when compared to Sanders, that Obama has governed as a center-left Democrat and occasionally a centrist Republican. How has the GOP reacted? Like mental patients. Insert, now, an actual socialist agenda into that equation and stir.
In order for Sanders to get anything passed he'd absolutely be forced to significantly compromise his agenda and cut deals with the Republicans. How might he compromise? First and foremost, his unwavering support for Israel as well as his votes against closing Guantanamo might indicate two areas that'd be on the table in negotiations with Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. But just imagine the apoplexy from his far-left supporters if he did. And that's just the tip of the iceberg in a divided government.
How would Sanders get his would-be Treasury Secretary Robert Reich (who's a fantastic choice, by the way) confirmed by a Republican Senate? He'd have to give them something they'd want, of course, and even then it'd be crap-shoot. Would the far-left be comfortable with a trade? Reich for, say, a moderate Supreme Court nominee? Or Reich for Keystone XL? Or Reich for ANWAR? Based on the last six-plus years and the far-left's ongoing perfectionist freakout over Obama's compromises, not to mention President Clinton's compromises in the 1990s, many heads would surely explode.
Bottom line: while Sanders' agenda is attractive, it's wise to calculate whether it's at all practical. Sadly and regrettably, I'd argue that none of it is, given the political climate today -- unless Sanders and his supporters are willing to compromise, and I don't think his supporters in particular have the capacity for compromise. Not even close, given recent history.
There's a definite nobility in voting for candidates who best align with our personal values, even if they have no chance of winning. But our convictions in the voting booth are equally if not less important as having a realistic outlook on the bigger picture, and voters of both parties would do well to seriously consider these factors. If a vote for a longshot candidate with a longshot agenda triggers an explosive and perhaps irreparable blowback against your values, was it really worth it? Meanwhile, the left ought to provide Sanders just enough leverage to inject his message into the mainstream. At the end of the day, isn't that the point?_______________Subscribe for free to the Bob & Chez Show podcast with special thanks to Tatiana Mendez.
Cross-posted at The Daily Banter.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 7 hours ago.
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Mental Health Is Still Getting Short Shrift Despite Laws
This piece comes to us courtesy of Stateline. Stateline is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news service of the Pew Charitable Trusts that provides daily reporting and analysis on trends in state policy.
Under federal law, insurance plans that cover mental health must offer benefits that are on par with medical and surgical benefits. Twenty-three states also require some level of parity.
The federal law, approved in 2008, and most of the state ones bar insurers from charging higher copayments and deductibles for mental health services. Insurers must pay for mental health treatment of the same scope and duration as other covered treatments; they can’t require people to get additional authorizations for mental health services; and they must offer an equally extensive selection of mental health providers and approved drugs.
Federal and state regulators have an easy time keeping track of copayments and deductibles, and insurers typically follow those rules. Compliance with parity requirements for the actual delivery of medical services is another story.
The responsibility for enforcing parity laws is divided between the federal government and the states. Under the federal parity law, states are supposed to police commercial insurance plans and Medicaid, although the federal government can step in if it determines states aren’t doing enough. The federal government is responsible for overseeing self-insured plans.
But among states, only California and New York consistently enforce the rules, mental health experts say. As a result, Americans with mental illness and addictions “don’t have a right to mental health and addiction treatment that the law promises,” said Emily Feinstein of CASAColumbia, a nonprofit organization focused on drug addiction.
In a report released last month, the National Alliance on Mental Illness found that patients seeking mental health services from private insurers were denied coverage at a rate double that of those seeking medical services. The report also found that patients encountered more barriers in getting psychiatric and substance use medications.
One major roadblock is that health insurers usually do not disclose policies for determining if a treatment is medically necessary. Without that information, it is difficult for regulators and consumers to determine whether the denial of coverage is warranted. Although the federal parity law requires insurers to divulge that information to patients and doctors upon request, critics and plaintiff attorneys say insurers are still keeping too much hidden and states aren’t diligent in forcing disclosure.
“The fact that health plans have not been transparent about approving or denying care means that providers are flying blind and consumers are losing out,” said Sita Diehl, director of state policy and advocacy for the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
Another problem has been the federal government’s long delay in coming up with regulations to implement the 2008 parity law. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services finally issued rules for most commercial insurance plans at the end of 2013, and they took effect last July. The final rules for Medicaid managed care plans won’t be in place before the end of 2016—at the earliest. (Medicaid fee-for-service plans and Medicare remain exempt from the federal parity law.)
Mental health advocates are hopeful that as the federal rules take effect for insurance plans issued after July 1, 2014, they will give regulators a stronger hand in enforcing parity.
The Affordable Care Act also has complicated matters, according to advocates. Implementing the extensive new health care law so overwhelmed the states and federal government that ensuring compliance with parity laws simply got pushed aside.
But some believe the main barrier to enforcement is the same one that led to inferior mental health benefits in the first place: the stigma associated with mental illness and addictions.
“I can’t help but feel that the stigma associated with having a mental health or developmental disability impacts the zeal with which regulators want to get in on this issue,” said Ele Hamburger, a Seattle attorney who said she has won more than a half-dozen settlements against insurers on parity grounds. “That stigma is so widespread.”
New York and California Lead the Way
Two months ago, New York state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced that Beacon Health Options had agreed to a $900,000 settlement after a state investigation revealed that the company denied coverage for mental health and substance use services at twice the rate its affiliated insurers had rejected claims for medical and surgical services. Beacon administers behavioral health benefits for 2.7 million New Yorkers.
Schneiderman, a Democrat, has reached settlements in five cases involving health plans covering a total of 4 million New Yorkers. He is the exception: No other state attorney general has sought sanctions against insurers for violating state or federal laws requiring mental health parity, according to New York officials.
“Obviously, Attorney General Schneiderman is really a hero in terms of this movement,” said Patrick Kennedy, a former Democratic congressman from Rhode Island. The Kennedy Forum, which he founded after leaving Congress in 2011, promotes mental health parity. “If he’s found a consistent pattern and practice of discrimination in his state, it’s only logical that there are similar practices in other states in the country. They can’t just be picking on New Yorkers.”
Other mental health experts agree. “I haven’t seen a lot of evidence of states enforcing parity,” Feinstein said.
According to Kennedy, California and New York are the only states that consistently enforce mental health parity. Before it authorizes a health insurance plan to operate in the state, California scrutinizes it to determine whether its coverage meets parity requirements. Once an insurer is cleared, state regulators closely monitor it and can impose a financial penalty if it doesn’t live up to its promises.
Hamburger, the Seattle attorney, said that some of her clients whose insurance companies denied their mental health or substance use claims appealed to the state of Washington for help, but did not receive any.
Stephanie Marquis, a spokesman for the Washington insurance commissioner, said the state was still working on regulations to support the state parity law in 2014 when the state Supreme Court ruled in favor of some of Hamburger’s clients. Marquis said the court gave the state guidance on how it should enforce parity. Now that the state has its own rules along with the federal ones, Marquis said her office “will be using the new parity analysis tools we have in place” to evaluate 2016 insurance plans.
Government Advantages
With their superior resources and investigative powers, state regulators and law enforcement agencies are able to review claims records and internal company policies in a way that consumers or private lawyers cannot. Hamburger said that private lawyers can force insurers to disclose the information through discovery, but that requires a lawsuit and perhaps months or years of delays for a person who may need help immediately.
“These laws need to be enforced by government entities because it’s all about doing comparisons between data sets,” said Lisa Landau, chief of the New York attorney general’s health care bureau, which brought the cases against the insurers in New York.
New York passed its state parity law in 2006. By 2011, Landau said, officials began to notice an alarmingly high number of complaints to the attorney general’s health hotline regarding the denial of claims by health insurers for mental health addiction treatments.
Investigators found that some insurers were denying nearly half of all claims for substance abuse treatment, Landau said. They also discovered exclusions for some types of treatment for certain mental illnesses, such as eating disorders. And patients with mental illnesses were often forced to make a certain number of outpatient visits before gaining approval to enter a residential facility. That so-called “fail first” process is nearly unheard of on the medical and surgical side.
Landau said that when her office began its investigations, it looked around the country to review other states’ enforcement actions. “We didn’t see any,” she said.
Aside from Beacon Health Options (formerly known as ValueOptions), Schneiderman has reached settlements with four other health plans: EmblemHealth and MVP Health Care, both of which subcontracted administration of mental health and substance use claims to Beacon; Cigna; and Excellus Blue Cross Blue Shield. Since the settlements, Landau said, 45 percent of previously rejected mental health and substance abuse claims have been overturned on appeal.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 7 hours ago.
Under federal law, insurance plans that cover mental health must offer benefits that are on par with medical and surgical benefits. Twenty-three states also require some level of parity.
The federal law, approved in 2008, and most of the state ones bar insurers from charging higher copayments and deductibles for mental health services. Insurers must pay for mental health treatment of the same scope and duration as other covered treatments; they can’t require people to get additional authorizations for mental health services; and they must offer an equally extensive selection of mental health providers and approved drugs.
Federal and state regulators have an easy time keeping track of copayments and deductibles, and insurers typically follow those rules. Compliance with parity requirements for the actual delivery of medical services is another story.
The responsibility for enforcing parity laws is divided between the federal government and the states. Under the federal parity law, states are supposed to police commercial insurance plans and Medicaid, although the federal government can step in if it determines states aren’t doing enough. The federal government is responsible for overseeing self-insured plans.
But among states, only California and New York consistently enforce the rules, mental health experts say. As a result, Americans with mental illness and addictions “don’t have a right to mental health and addiction treatment that the law promises,” said Emily Feinstein of CASAColumbia, a nonprofit organization focused on drug addiction.
In a report released last month, the National Alliance on Mental Illness found that patients seeking mental health services from private insurers were denied coverage at a rate double that of those seeking medical services. The report also found that patients encountered more barriers in getting psychiatric and substance use medications.
One major roadblock is that health insurers usually do not disclose policies for determining if a treatment is medically necessary. Without that information, it is difficult for regulators and consumers to determine whether the denial of coverage is warranted. Although the federal parity law requires insurers to divulge that information to patients and doctors upon request, critics and plaintiff attorneys say insurers are still keeping too much hidden and states aren’t diligent in forcing disclosure.
“The fact that health plans have not been transparent about approving or denying care means that providers are flying blind and consumers are losing out,” said Sita Diehl, director of state policy and advocacy for the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
Another problem has been the federal government’s long delay in coming up with regulations to implement the 2008 parity law. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services finally issued rules for most commercial insurance plans at the end of 2013, and they took effect last July. The final rules for Medicaid managed care plans won’t be in place before the end of 2016—at the earliest. (Medicaid fee-for-service plans and Medicare remain exempt from the federal parity law.)
Mental health advocates are hopeful that as the federal rules take effect for insurance plans issued after July 1, 2014, they will give regulators a stronger hand in enforcing parity.
The Affordable Care Act also has complicated matters, according to advocates. Implementing the extensive new health care law so overwhelmed the states and federal government that ensuring compliance with parity laws simply got pushed aside.
But some believe the main barrier to enforcement is the same one that led to inferior mental health benefits in the first place: the stigma associated with mental illness and addictions.
“I can’t help but feel that the stigma associated with having a mental health or developmental disability impacts the zeal with which regulators want to get in on this issue,” said Ele Hamburger, a Seattle attorney who said she has won more than a half-dozen settlements against insurers on parity grounds. “That stigma is so widespread.”
New York and California Lead the Way
Two months ago, New York state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced that Beacon Health Options had agreed to a $900,000 settlement after a state investigation revealed that the company denied coverage for mental health and substance use services at twice the rate its affiliated insurers had rejected claims for medical and surgical services. Beacon administers behavioral health benefits for 2.7 million New Yorkers.
Schneiderman, a Democrat, has reached settlements in five cases involving health plans covering a total of 4 million New Yorkers. He is the exception: No other state attorney general has sought sanctions against insurers for violating state or federal laws requiring mental health parity, according to New York officials.
“Obviously, Attorney General Schneiderman is really a hero in terms of this movement,” said Patrick Kennedy, a former Democratic congressman from Rhode Island. The Kennedy Forum, which he founded after leaving Congress in 2011, promotes mental health parity. “If he’s found a consistent pattern and practice of discrimination in his state, it’s only logical that there are similar practices in other states in the country. They can’t just be picking on New Yorkers.”
Other mental health experts agree. “I haven’t seen a lot of evidence of states enforcing parity,” Feinstein said.
According to Kennedy, California and New York are the only states that consistently enforce mental health parity. Before it authorizes a health insurance plan to operate in the state, California scrutinizes it to determine whether its coverage meets parity requirements. Once an insurer is cleared, state regulators closely monitor it and can impose a financial penalty if it doesn’t live up to its promises.
Hamburger, the Seattle attorney, said that some of her clients whose insurance companies denied their mental health or substance use claims appealed to the state of Washington for help, but did not receive any.
Stephanie Marquis, a spokesman for the Washington insurance commissioner, said the state was still working on regulations to support the state parity law in 2014 when the state Supreme Court ruled in favor of some of Hamburger’s clients. Marquis said the court gave the state guidance on how it should enforce parity. Now that the state has its own rules along with the federal ones, Marquis said her office “will be using the new parity analysis tools we have in place” to evaluate 2016 insurance plans.
Government Advantages
With their superior resources and investigative powers, state regulators and law enforcement agencies are able to review claims records and internal company policies in a way that consumers or private lawyers cannot. Hamburger said that private lawyers can force insurers to disclose the information through discovery, but that requires a lawsuit and perhaps months or years of delays for a person who may need help immediately.
“These laws need to be enforced by government entities because it’s all about doing comparisons between data sets,” said Lisa Landau, chief of the New York attorney general’s health care bureau, which brought the cases against the insurers in New York.
New York passed its state parity law in 2006. By 2011, Landau said, officials began to notice an alarmingly high number of complaints to the attorney general’s health hotline regarding the denial of claims by health insurers for mental health addiction treatments.
Investigators found that some insurers were denying nearly half of all claims for substance abuse treatment, Landau said. They also discovered exclusions for some types of treatment for certain mental illnesses, such as eating disorders. And patients with mental illnesses were often forced to make a certain number of outpatient visits before gaining approval to enter a residential facility. That so-called “fail first” process is nearly unheard of on the medical and surgical side.
Landau said that when her office began its investigations, it looked around the country to review other states’ enforcement actions. “We didn’t see any,” she said.
Aside from Beacon Health Options (formerly known as ValueOptions), Schneiderman has reached settlements with four other health plans: EmblemHealth and MVP Health Care, both of which subcontracted administration of mental health and substance use claims to Beacon; Cigna; and Excellus Blue Cross Blue Shield. Since the settlements, Landau said, 45 percent of previously rejected mental health and substance abuse claims have been overturned on appeal.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 7 hours ago.
↧
70 million Americans report stolen data
*70 million Americans report stolen data*
More than 70 million American adults discovered that their personal information had been compromised in 2014, according to projections from a recent nationally representative survey of more than 3,000 American adults, conducted by Consumer Reports.
While some of those incidents may have resulted from stolen credit cards or other crimes, many stemmed from data breaches. And, as a slew of widely reported breaches last year showed, not only online shoppers are at risk. According to Consumer Reports’s survey, 79% of those notified of a data breach were told by a brick-and-mortar store or a financial institution. Just eighteen percent said the problem originated with an online retailer.
Those findings are supported by research from the non-profit Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), which found that a record high 783 data breaches occurred in 2014, up more than 27.5 percent from 2013. “Last year was an exceptional year because of the raw numbers and the traction they were getting in the media,” says Eva Velasquez, CEO/president of ITRC.
It’s important to protect your data from identity theft, whether you’ve been notified of a breach or not. That might sound obvious, but in the Consumer Reports survey, half of those who were affected by data theft said they did not change their online behavior afterward. Here are 10 simple steps you can take to lock down your sensitive info, and five things to do if you've been notified of a breach. You should also be sure to carefully check the “explanations of benefits” notices sent by your health insurance provider to make sure they’re for services you actually received and not something a medical identity thief ordered up, Velasquez says.
*Need to protect your computer from hackers? Check out our Security Software Buying Guide.*
The study arguably highlights the need for stronger consumer protections. Among the latest proposals in Congress is the Consumer Privacy Protection Act, a bill introduced by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D, Vt.) that would cover not only financial data, but things like photos and videos stored in the cloud. It would also require companies to notify consumers of a breach within 30 days. "This measure, as well as another bill introduced by Senator Nelson (D, Fla.) will move the ball forward on better data protection for consumers," says Ellen Bloom, Senior Director of Federal Policy and the Washington Office for Consumers Union, the advocacy branch of Consumer Reports. "Congress needs to set strong federal standards for defending consumer data while allowing states to enact or maintain more stringent laws if necessary to protect their residents."—Donna Tapellini
*Consumer Reports has no relationship with any advertisers on this website. Copyright © 2006-2015 Consumers Union of U.S.*
*Subscribe now!*
Subscribe to *ConsumerReports.org* for expert Ratings, buying advice and reliability on hundreds of products.
--------------------
Update your feed preferences
Reported by Consumer Reports 4 hours ago.
More than 70 million American adults discovered that their personal information had been compromised in 2014, according to projections from a recent nationally representative survey of more than 3,000 American adults, conducted by Consumer Reports.
While some of those incidents may have resulted from stolen credit cards or other crimes, many stemmed from data breaches. And, as a slew of widely reported breaches last year showed, not only online shoppers are at risk. According to Consumer Reports’s survey, 79% of those notified of a data breach were told by a brick-and-mortar store or a financial institution. Just eighteen percent said the problem originated with an online retailer.
Those findings are supported by research from the non-profit Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), which found that a record high 783 data breaches occurred in 2014, up more than 27.5 percent from 2013. “Last year was an exceptional year because of the raw numbers and the traction they were getting in the media,” says Eva Velasquez, CEO/president of ITRC.
It’s important to protect your data from identity theft, whether you’ve been notified of a breach or not. That might sound obvious, but in the Consumer Reports survey, half of those who were affected by data theft said they did not change their online behavior afterward. Here are 10 simple steps you can take to lock down your sensitive info, and five things to do if you've been notified of a breach. You should also be sure to carefully check the “explanations of benefits” notices sent by your health insurance provider to make sure they’re for services you actually received and not something a medical identity thief ordered up, Velasquez says.
*Need to protect your computer from hackers? Check out our Security Software Buying Guide.*
The study arguably highlights the need for stronger consumer protections. Among the latest proposals in Congress is the Consumer Privacy Protection Act, a bill introduced by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D, Vt.) that would cover not only financial data, but things like photos and videos stored in the cloud. It would also require companies to notify consumers of a breach within 30 days. "This measure, as well as another bill introduced by Senator Nelson (D, Fla.) will move the ball forward on better data protection for consumers," says Ellen Bloom, Senior Director of Federal Policy and the Washington Office for Consumers Union, the advocacy branch of Consumer Reports. "Congress needs to set strong federal standards for defending consumer data while allowing states to enact or maintain more stringent laws if necessary to protect their residents."—Donna Tapellini
*Consumer Reports has no relationship with any advertisers on this website. Copyright © 2006-2015 Consumers Union of U.S.*
*Subscribe now!*
Subscribe to *ConsumerReports.org* for expert Ratings, buying advice and reliability on hundreds of products.
--------------------
Update your feed preferences
Reported by Consumer Reports 4 hours ago.
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Why This Insurer Wants You to Wear a Health Tracker
Wearable tech meets rewards at a growing health insurance company.
Reported by FOXNews.com 5 hours ago.
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United States: OCR Enforcement Of HIPAA Affects Entities Of All Sizes: Small Pharmacy Enters Into Latest Settlement - McGuireWoods LLP
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced late last week that Cornell Prescription Pharmacy (Cornell) agreed to settle potential violations of the Health Insurance Portability
Reported by Mondaq 6 hours ago.
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How Health Care Technology Is Minting A New Class Of Billionaires
Zenefits’ announcement that it raised $500 million at a $4.5 billion valuation marks another milestone for the health care information technology and services industry. Zenefits manages health insurance, payroll, and other benefits for small businesses. The valuation was stunning, and it makes Parker Conrad, who launched the start-up in 2013, [...]
Reported by Forbes.com 1 hour ago.
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A Fist Fight at the New York Times?
Jonathon Chait seems to be trying to get a fist fight going at the New York Times. He claims in New York Magazine that a recent column by Paul Krugman was actually an attack on David Brooks. Brooks claimed that we have spent huge sums on anti-poverty efforts with no success and that the problem of poverty is due to poor people lacking middle class values.
I side with Krugman on the question of whether government expenditures make a difference on poverty. But I think Krugman and other critics of Brooks are unfairly misreading Brooks' claim. Living in poverty stresses families and undermines the development of nurturing social relationships and the self-regulatory skills, which are foundational for successful development. We need to change public policies to significantly increase the well-being of people who are currently living in poverty, but we also need to provide evidence-based family and school interventions to reduce interpersonal conflict and ensure young people's successful development.
Brooks' claim that we have invested huge sums of money in anti-poverty efforts and they have not reduced poverty is misleading. The investments he alludes to are things like Medicare and Medicaid, the EITC, and TANF. These have reduced poverty. For example, since Medicare was instituted in 1966 the proportion of poor people over 65 has dropped from 30% to 8.9%. But we have not reduced the rate of child poverty. It has risen from about 15% in 1975 to 22% in 2014.
Brooks also ignores the fact that the American economy has devastated huge swaths of formerly middle class people thanks to our shipping jobs overseas, not indexing the minimum wage, and allowing millions of Americans to live without health insurance during an era when health care costs soared. Read Robert Putnam's new book, Our Kids and you will find it hard to conclude that public policy has done all it can to alleviate poverty.
Simply increasing the funds of poor families does have measurable benefits. For example, Jane Costello and her colleague at Duke University, found that the rates of mental disorders among Native American children dropped significantly when their tribe opened a casino and increased the income of many poor families.
In sum, government funds have alleviated some poverty and are vital to the wellbeing of people living in poverty. If they have not reduced chronic poverty it is in part because public policy has, on the whole, made it impossible for many families to climb out of poverty. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson documented how, under the thrall of free market ideology, policy as failed to (a) increase the minimum wage and index it to inflation, (b) expand the Earned Income Tax Credit or allow its use to be encouraged (c) regulate company-provided pension plans, or (d) regulate the financial industry, including pay day loans and financial instruments, which fueled the housing bubble.
At the same time, Brooks makes an important point, which has been too quickly characterized as accusing poor people of lacking the proper values--of "blaming the victim." Brooks claims that "...the real barriers to mobility are matters of social psychology, the quality of relationships in a home and a neighborhood that either encourage or discourage responsibility, future-oriented thinking, and practical ambition."
I don't think these are the only barriers, but the evidence is clear that the quality of relationships in families, schools, and neighborhoods has an enormous effect on young people's development. When families are stressed by poverty they are more likely to have high levels of conflict. Conflict is a stressor for children that can produce life-long physiological changes and undermine children's ability to learn to regulate their emotions or resist acting impulsively.
The evidence is so clear, that if child poverty were considered to be a pathogen like contaminated water, our public health system would be empowered to take every step necessary to eliminate it.
What both Brooks and Krugman seem to be unaware of is the wealth of evidence on the value of family and school prevention programs that significantly improve the quality of interactions such that parents and teachers are less punitive and far more reinforcing of the social skills and prosocial behavior young people need to succeed. In reviewing evidence on the impact of preventive interventions, an Institute of Medicine panel I was on concluded that, in principle, we have the knowledge to "begin to create a society in which young people arrive at adulthood with the skills, interests, assets, and health habits needed to live healthy, happy, and productive lives in caring relationships with others."
The family and school interventions the IOM identified and I describe in The Nurture Effect, help children learn self-regulation and social skills that are vital to their success. And they prevent myriad problems including delinquency, depression, drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, and academic failure. There are interventions for the prenatal period through adolescence. Most cost far less than the money they save in reduced criminal justice, health, care and educational expenses. And there is even some evidence these programs can lift families out of poverty. For example, a nine year follow-up of Parent Management Training, Oregon showed that mothers who receive the program increased their socio-economic status.
We can't expect all families that have lived in the stress of poverty to suddenly become more patient and skilled when their economic situation improves. Certainly, as the Costello study shows, some improvement will occur. But parents who have been scarred by a life of threat and stress need support from patient and caring people to develop the skills they need to nurture their children's successful development.
In sum, existing government programs have had an effect in reducing poverty among the elderly, but are currently insufficient to lift families with children out of poverty. We need more generous benefits via the Earned Income Tax Credit, TANF, and a higher minimum wage indexed to inflation. More generally, we need to make it a central goal of public policy to reduce the number of children who are growing up in poverty. And, at the same time, we need to make evidence-based family interventions available to every family that can benefit so that families can nurture the development of the next generation of caring and productive adults.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 1 hour ago.
I side with Krugman on the question of whether government expenditures make a difference on poverty. But I think Krugman and other critics of Brooks are unfairly misreading Brooks' claim. Living in poverty stresses families and undermines the development of nurturing social relationships and the self-regulatory skills, which are foundational for successful development. We need to change public policies to significantly increase the well-being of people who are currently living in poverty, but we also need to provide evidence-based family and school interventions to reduce interpersonal conflict and ensure young people's successful development.
Brooks' claim that we have invested huge sums of money in anti-poverty efforts and they have not reduced poverty is misleading. The investments he alludes to are things like Medicare and Medicaid, the EITC, and TANF. These have reduced poverty. For example, since Medicare was instituted in 1966 the proportion of poor people over 65 has dropped from 30% to 8.9%. But we have not reduced the rate of child poverty. It has risen from about 15% in 1975 to 22% in 2014.
Brooks also ignores the fact that the American economy has devastated huge swaths of formerly middle class people thanks to our shipping jobs overseas, not indexing the minimum wage, and allowing millions of Americans to live without health insurance during an era when health care costs soared. Read Robert Putnam's new book, Our Kids and you will find it hard to conclude that public policy has done all it can to alleviate poverty.
Simply increasing the funds of poor families does have measurable benefits. For example, Jane Costello and her colleague at Duke University, found that the rates of mental disorders among Native American children dropped significantly when their tribe opened a casino and increased the income of many poor families.
In sum, government funds have alleviated some poverty and are vital to the wellbeing of people living in poverty. If they have not reduced chronic poverty it is in part because public policy has, on the whole, made it impossible for many families to climb out of poverty. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson documented how, under the thrall of free market ideology, policy as failed to (a) increase the minimum wage and index it to inflation, (b) expand the Earned Income Tax Credit or allow its use to be encouraged (c) regulate company-provided pension plans, or (d) regulate the financial industry, including pay day loans and financial instruments, which fueled the housing bubble.
At the same time, Brooks makes an important point, which has been too quickly characterized as accusing poor people of lacking the proper values--of "blaming the victim." Brooks claims that "...the real barriers to mobility are matters of social psychology, the quality of relationships in a home and a neighborhood that either encourage or discourage responsibility, future-oriented thinking, and practical ambition."
I don't think these are the only barriers, but the evidence is clear that the quality of relationships in families, schools, and neighborhoods has an enormous effect on young people's development. When families are stressed by poverty they are more likely to have high levels of conflict. Conflict is a stressor for children that can produce life-long physiological changes and undermine children's ability to learn to regulate their emotions or resist acting impulsively.
The evidence is so clear, that if child poverty were considered to be a pathogen like contaminated water, our public health system would be empowered to take every step necessary to eliminate it.
What both Brooks and Krugman seem to be unaware of is the wealth of evidence on the value of family and school prevention programs that significantly improve the quality of interactions such that parents and teachers are less punitive and far more reinforcing of the social skills and prosocial behavior young people need to succeed. In reviewing evidence on the impact of preventive interventions, an Institute of Medicine panel I was on concluded that, in principle, we have the knowledge to "begin to create a society in which young people arrive at adulthood with the skills, interests, assets, and health habits needed to live healthy, happy, and productive lives in caring relationships with others."
The family and school interventions the IOM identified and I describe in The Nurture Effect, help children learn self-regulation and social skills that are vital to their success. And they prevent myriad problems including delinquency, depression, drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, and academic failure. There are interventions for the prenatal period through adolescence. Most cost far less than the money they save in reduced criminal justice, health, care and educational expenses. And there is even some evidence these programs can lift families out of poverty. For example, a nine year follow-up of Parent Management Training, Oregon showed that mothers who receive the program increased their socio-economic status.
We can't expect all families that have lived in the stress of poverty to suddenly become more patient and skilled when their economic situation improves. Certainly, as the Costello study shows, some improvement will occur. But parents who have been scarred by a life of threat and stress need support from patient and caring people to develop the skills they need to nurture their children's successful development.
In sum, existing government programs have had an effect in reducing poverty among the elderly, but are currently insufficient to lift families with children out of poverty. We need more generous benefits via the Earned Income Tax Credit, TANF, and a higher minimum wage indexed to inflation. More generally, we need to make it a central goal of public policy to reduce the number of children who are growing up in poverty. And, at the same time, we need to make evidence-based family interventions available to every family that can benefit so that families can nurture the development of the next generation of caring and productive adults.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 1 hour ago.
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How Obamacare's 1,000 pages and a chance meeting helped Sanjay Singh create a $50M company
Few people probably actually read the more than 1,000 pages of the health reform bill better known as Obamacare. But one of them was Sanjay Singh, CEO of Reston-based hCentive. And it helped him and his team come up with a product that would create a $50 million-plus business responsible for creating multiple statewide health insurance exchanges. “I literally said, ‘Here’s the bill. Start thinking about product ideas,’” Singh said. “We decided, ‘Let’s build an exchange.’” By…
Reported by bizjournals 1 day ago.
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Guest Post: The Big Business Of Cancer - 100 Billion Dollars Was Spent On Cancer Drugs Last Year Alone
Submitted by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,*If you are an American, there is a 1 in 3 chance that you will get cancer during your lifetime. * If you are a man, the odds are closer to 1 in 2. And almost everyone in America either knows someone who currently has cancer or who has already died from cancer. *But it wasn’t always this way.* Back in the 1940s, only one out of every sixteen Americans would develop cancer. Something has happened that has caused the cancer rate in this nation to absolutely explode, and it is being projected that cancer will soon surpass heart disease and become the leading cause of death in the United States. Overall, the World Health Organization says that approximately 14 million new cases of cancer are diagnosed around the globe each year, and the number of new cases is expected to increase by about 70 percent over the next 2 decades.
There are very few words in the English language that cause more fear than the word “cancer”, but *despite billions spent on research and all of the technological progress we have made over the years this plague just continues to spiral wildly out of control.* Why is that?
*In America today, more money is spent to treat cancer than to treat any other disease by far.* In fact, according to NBC News, 100 *BILLION* dollars was spent on cancer drugs just last year alone…
As drug prices continue to fall under ever-increasing scrutiny, spending on cancer medicines has hit a new milestone: $100 billion in 2014.
That’s up more than 10 percent from 2013, and up from $75 billion five years earlier, according to a report published Tuesday from the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics.
100 million dollars would be an astounding amount of money to spend on these drugs. But 100 *billion* dollars is 1,000 times as much money as 100 million dollars. And the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics is projecting that the amount of money spent on cancer drugs will continue to grow at a rate of 6 to 8 percent a year.
Needless to say, there are a lot of people out there that are becoming exceedingly wealthy treating this disease.
And the cost of some these drugs is absolutely absurd. According to NBC News, two of the latest cancer drugs to be developed “are priced at $12,500 *a month*“…
Forty-five new drugs for cancer hit the market between 2010 and 2014, including 10 last year alone, IMS said. Two of those are so-called immunotherapies, a hot new class that harnesses the immune system to fight cancer. They are Opdivo from Bristol-Myers Squibb and Keytruda from Merck. *Both are priced at $12,500 a month*.
Yes, I understand that drug companies are in business to make a profit.
But how can anyone possibly justify charging cancer patients that much for their medicine?
If you are diagnosed with cancer in America today and you choose to trust the medical system with your treatment, you can say goodbye to your financial future. Even if you have health insurance, you will probably end up flat broke one way or the other. Either you will survive and be flat broke, or you will die flat broke.
And despite all of our ultra-expensive treatments, the survival rate for cancer is still not very good. At this point, the five year survival rate for those diagnosed with cancer is just 65 percent. That means that *35 percent* of those diagnosed with cancer are going to end up dead within five years, and for certain forms of cancer that percentage is much, much higher.
Sadly, as I mentioned at the top of this article, the percentage of the population getting cancer just continues to go up…
We have lost the war on cancer. At the beginning of the last century, *one person in twenty* would get cancer. In the 1940s it was *one out of every sixteen people*. In the 1970s it was *one person out of ten*. Today *one person out of three* gets cancer in the course of their life.
We live in a society that is highly toxic, and it is getting worse with each passing day.
And once you do develop cancer, doctors are not allowed to prescribe any “alternative treatments” for you. They are only permitted to offer you the treatments that the system tells them that they must offer.
One of these is chemotherapy. It is an absolutely nightmarish treatment that often kills the patient before it kills the cancer. The following is how one woman described her experience with chemo…
This highly toxic fluid was being injected into my veins. The nurse administering it was wearing protective gloves because it would burn her skin if just a tiny drip came into contact with it. I couldn’t help asking myself “If such precautions are needed to be taken on the outside, what is it doing to me on the inside?” *From 7 pm that evening, I vomited solidly for two and a half days. During my treatment, I lost my hair by the handful, I lost my appetite, my skin colour, my zest for life. I was death on legs*.
Many patients go through round after hellish round, hoping that it will do something about their cancer. Have you ever known someone who has gone through this ordeal? It can be absolutely heartbreaking.
But in the end, there is a tremendous amount of doubt regarding whether chemo does much good at all. Just consider the words of Dr. Ralph Moss, the author of a book entitled “The Cancer Industry“…
In the end, *there is no proof that chemotherapy actually extends life* in the vast majority of cases, and this is *the great lie* about chemotherapy, that somehow there is a correlation between shrinking a tumour and extending the life of a patient.
So why do oncologists push chemo so hard?
Well, it is because they make a tremendous amount of money doing it…
According to the research of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics
fame, “Oncologists are some of the highest paid doctors, their average income is increasing faster than any other specialist in the medical field, and more than half their income comes from selling and administering chemotherapy.”
*Yes you read that right. Oncologists make a huge profit, as much as two-thirds of their income in some cases, from chemotherapy drugs. *
Their business model is very different from other doctors because you can’t buy chemotherapy drugs at your local pharmacy.
Oncologists buy these drugs direct at wholesale prices, then they mark them up and bill the insurance companies. This legal profiting on drugs by doctors is unique to the cancer treatment world. They’re making money off the drugs that they insist you take to save your life. That’s a HUGE conflict of interest. They’re selling you the drugs, and charging you for the privilege of putting them in your body. No other doctor can do that.
*Our system is deeply corrupt and deeply broken.*
*But nothing is going to change any time soon because hundreds of billions of dollars are being made.* Reported by Zero Hedge 22 hours ago.
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Associations complain state has left their health plans in limbo
While the Washington Education Association health trust has won an OK from the state, other groups providing health insurance for thousands of small-business employees are finding their plans in limbo or rejected.
Reported by Seattle Times 21 hours ago.
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Associations slam state for rejecting their health plans
While the Washington Education Association health trust has won an OK from the state, other groups providing health insurance for thousands of small-business employees are finding their plans in limbo or rejected.
Reported by Seattle Times 17 hours ago.
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7 Types of 'Insurance' That Are a Waste of Money
Filed under: Identity Theft, Travel, Insurance Industry, Renting, PetsBy Hiram Reisner
Some types of insurance and financial protection aren't only smart, but legally required: Most states demand some sort of vehicle insurance. Now, with the Affordable Care Act, you can add health insurance to the required list. Other coverage just makes sense, such as renters insurance or flood coverage for people who live in low-lying areas.
But, there are many forms of protection -- sold in the name of insurance, monitoring and warranties -- that are at best questionable and prey on one of our most powerful natural instincts: fear.
Here are some that we believe require careful thought or should be avoided altogether:
*1. Identity theft insurance.* Identity theft insurance doesn't really prevent identity theft. The best way to protect yourself, according to tips from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners is to take measures to guard your Social Security number, shred financial documents and monitor your credit activity.
Identity theft insurance policies don't cover the money lost through an ID scam; most cover expenses incurred in restoring your identity and credit, and you can probably take most of these steps yourself, according to U.S. News & World Report.
The NAIC says insurance ranges from $25 to $60 a year; most policies have benefit limits ranging from $10,000 to $15,000; and many have deductibles requiring you to pay the first $100 to $500.
Closely related to ID theft insurance are credit monitoring services. But these, too, offer to perform functions already provided by your credit card company or watch transactions that you can monitor yourself.
You can get fraud alerts from your credit card company and free credit monitoring from some financial institutions and other organizations, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.
In addition, the Federal Trade Commission provides tips on how to protect yourself from becoming a victim, without the need for "insurance." So does the Identity Theft Resource Center.
*2. Extended warranties.* Whether you are buying a TV, a computer or a hedge trimmer, chances are when the salesman tallies up the bill you will be offered an extended warranty. In most cases, you don't need it.
According to Consumer Reports, stores keep 50 percent or more of what they charge for these contracts, which is a considerably larger profit margin than they make selling the product! The salesperson gets a hefty cut of every warranty sold.
Products seldom break during the two-to-three-year period after the manufacturer's warranty and service plan expires. And the repairs can cost less than the large amounts you are paying for the warranties, according to Consumer Reports.
*3. Home warranties.* Consumers frequently expect more than these plans deliver and end up frustrated, Money Talks News founder Stacy Johnson says. See: "Are Home Warranties Worth the Money?" for a breakdown of the pros and cons of home warranties -- the majority are cons.
If you decide to go with a warranty, you need to read the fine print to see what is really covered. Stacy tells of the time he had a home warranty that covered his refrigerator. "When it broke, I had to pay $50 for the repairman to come out," he says. "Then he said it was excluded because the condenser coils were dusty."
Furthermore, in my experience, the warranty dictates which repair company comes to your house: You don't have any say in that. If you have a trusted plumber, electrician or appliance service, this is another reason that a home warranty may not be for you.
*4. Rental car insurance. *You will be offered the insurance, but you might already be covered.
Call your insurance company before you rent to see whether your coverage includes rental cars. Most do, but it depends on your policy. Make sure you tell the insurer what type of vehicle you are going to rent, from my experience it can make a difference.
If you pay with a credit card, you also are probably covered as most cards give you rental-car insurance of some sort, according to the Insurance Information Institute.
In decades of business travel, working with many car insurers and car rentals, I have never found that I need additional insurance from the rental car company.
*5. Air travel insurance.* Travel insurance can minimize financial risks of traveling: accidents, illness, missed flights, canceled tours, lost baggage, theft, terrorism, travel-company bankruptcies, emergency evacuation, and getting your body home if you die, says travel expert Rick Steves.
Travel insurance can total between 4 and 8 percent of the cost of your trip, but can go as high as 12 percent, depending on the plan you choose, according to Travel Insurance Review, which also gives you a plan comparison.
Steves says your insurance needs depend on the specifics of your trip: whether it is prepaid, whether your ticket is refundable, where you're traveling (Norway or Nigeria?) and the financial health of your tour company and airline. It depends on your state of health and the value of your luggage. Finally, it depends on whether you already have coverage through your medical insurance, homeowners or renters insurance, and/or credit card.
*6. Pet insurance.* This is a tough one because most people consider pets part of the family and because veterinary bills are high. But this is a highly personal decision.
"There's no magic formula that will tell you if it's right for you and your pet," according to the American Veterinary Medical Association.
The AVMA suggests you talk to your veterinarian about the general health of your pet. The age of the animal is also a factor.
If you do opt for pet insurance, first take a look at the AVMA's guidelines for pet health insurance policies.
For more information see "4 Ways to Keep Your Pet Away From the Vet."
*7. Cellphone insurance.* "If your phone is super expensive and you're super likely to lose it, it could be worth it," Stacy says of cellphone insurance. However, very few people fall into this category.
If your problem is dropping your phone, you could instead invest about $10 to get a shatterproof cellphone screen cover -- essentially tempered glass that is very difficult to break.
So, unless you tend to drop your phone in water, you probably don't need insurance, according to iGrad.com. The average cost is around $5 a month and there is usually a fairly high deductible.
If you're still interested, check first to see whether your phone has a warranty and what it covers, and make the decision from there.
For more detail on this subject, see "Why Cellphone Insurance is not Worth the Cost," which illustrates that in some cases premiums and deductibles are greater than the cost of replacing the phone.
Do you know of insurance or protection products that are suspect? Weigh in on our Facebook page. Sign up for our newsletter and we'll send you a regular digest of our newest stories, full of money saving tips and advice, free!
Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments Reported by DailyFinance 14 hours ago.
Some types of insurance and financial protection aren't only smart, but legally required: Most states demand some sort of vehicle insurance. Now, with the Affordable Care Act, you can add health insurance to the required list. Other coverage just makes sense, such as renters insurance or flood coverage for people who live in low-lying areas.
But, there are many forms of protection -- sold in the name of insurance, monitoring and warranties -- that are at best questionable and prey on one of our most powerful natural instincts: fear.
Here are some that we believe require careful thought or should be avoided altogether:
*1. Identity theft insurance.* Identity theft insurance doesn't really prevent identity theft. The best way to protect yourself, according to tips from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners is to take measures to guard your Social Security number, shred financial documents and monitor your credit activity.
Identity theft insurance policies don't cover the money lost through an ID scam; most cover expenses incurred in restoring your identity and credit, and you can probably take most of these steps yourself, according to U.S. News & World Report.
The NAIC says insurance ranges from $25 to $60 a year; most policies have benefit limits ranging from $10,000 to $15,000; and many have deductibles requiring you to pay the first $100 to $500.
Closely related to ID theft insurance are credit monitoring services. But these, too, offer to perform functions already provided by your credit card company or watch transactions that you can monitor yourself.
You can get fraud alerts from your credit card company and free credit monitoring from some financial institutions and other organizations, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.
In addition, the Federal Trade Commission provides tips on how to protect yourself from becoming a victim, without the need for "insurance." So does the Identity Theft Resource Center.
*2. Extended warranties.* Whether you are buying a TV, a computer or a hedge trimmer, chances are when the salesman tallies up the bill you will be offered an extended warranty. In most cases, you don't need it.
According to Consumer Reports, stores keep 50 percent or more of what they charge for these contracts, which is a considerably larger profit margin than they make selling the product! The salesperson gets a hefty cut of every warranty sold.
Products seldom break during the two-to-three-year period after the manufacturer's warranty and service plan expires. And the repairs can cost less than the large amounts you are paying for the warranties, according to Consumer Reports.
*3. Home warranties.* Consumers frequently expect more than these plans deliver and end up frustrated, Money Talks News founder Stacy Johnson says. See: "Are Home Warranties Worth the Money?" for a breakdown of the pros and cons of home warranties -- the majority are cons.
If you decide to go with a warranty, you need to read the fine print to see what is really covered. Stacy tells of the time he had a home warranty that covered his refrigerator. "When it broke, I had to pay $50 for the repairman to come out," he says. "Then he said it was excluded because the condenser coils were dusty."
Furthermore, in my experience, the warranty dictates which repair company comes to your house: You don't have any say in that. If you have a trusted plumber, electrician or appliance service, this is another reason that a home warranty may not be for you.
*4. Rental car insurance. *You will be offered the insurance, but you might already be covered.
Call your insurance company before you rent to see whether your coverage includes rental cars. Most do, but it depends on your policy. Make sure you tell the insurer what type of vehicle you are going to rent, from my experience it can make a difference.
If you pay with a credit card, you also are probably covered as most cards give you rental-car insurance of some sort, according to the Insurance Information Institute.
In decades of business travel, working with many car insurers and car rentals, I have never found that I need additional insurance from the rental car company.
*5. Air travel insurance.* Travel insurance can minimize financial risks of traveling: accidents, illness, missed flights, canceled tours, lost baggage, theft, terrorism, travel-company bankruptcies, emergency evacuation, and getting your body home if you die, says travel expert Rick Steves.
Travel insurance can total between 4 and 8 percent of the cost of your trip, but can go as high as 12 percent, depending on the plan you choose, according to Travel Insurance Review, which also gives you a plan comparison.
Steves says your insurance needs depend on the specifics of your trip: whether it is prepaid, whether your ticket is refundable, where you're traveling (Norway or Nigeria?) and the financial health of your tour company and airline. It depends on your state of health and the value of your luggage. Finally, it depends on whether you already have coverage through your medical insurance, homeowners or renters insurance, and/or credit card.
*6. Pet insurance.* This is a tough one because most people consider pets part of the family and because veterinary bills are high. But this is a highly personal decision.
"There's no magic formula that will tell you if it's right for you and your pet," according to the American Veterinary Medical Association.
The AVMA suggests you talk to your veterinarian about the general health of your pet. The age of the animal is also a factor.
If you do opt for pet insurance, first take a look at the AVMA's guidelines for pet health insurance policies.
For more information see "4 Ways to Keep Your Pet Away From the Vet."
*7. Cellphone insurance.* "If your phone is super expensive and you're super likely to lose it, it could be worth it," Stacy says of cellphone insurance. However, very few people fall into this category.
If your problem is dropping your phone, you could instead invest about $10 to get a shatterproof cellphone screen cover -- essentially tempered glass that is very difficult to break.
So, unless you tend to drop your phone in water, you probably don't need insurance, according to iGrad.com. The average cost is around $5 a month and there is usually a fairly high deductible.
If you're still interested, check first to see whether your phone has a warranty and what it covers, and make the decision from there.
For more detail on this subject, see "Why Cellphone Insurance is not Worth the Cost," which illustrates that in some cases premiums and deductibles are greater than the cost of replacing the phone.
Do you know of insurance or protection products that are suspect? Weigh in on our Facebook page. Sign up for our newsletter and we'll send you a regular digest of our newest stories, full of money saving tips and advice, free!
Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments Reported by DailyFinance 14 hours ago.
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