Charity is a good thing, and there will always be a role for it. However — voluntary donations cannot make up for our stingy healthcare system. When GoFundMe contributions provide care for a sick child, that does not excuse our country’s lack of national health insurance or paid sick leave. GoFundMe is currently bragging that…
The idea for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) originated in a paper that Elizabeth Warren wrote in 2007 while she was a law professor at Harvard. She moved to Washington after Dodd-Frank passed, to help then-President Obama get CFPB up and running. She touted it as a tool to protect average people from banks behaving badly. Obama…
For an individual or small business, the entire process of bankruptcy can be pretty horrific. You must deal with the shame, the harassing letters and phone calls, and the final court proceedings. This is clearly not true for certain investors and for large corporations… 1) They can use bankruptcy to escape lawsuits Bankruptcy has become…
Liberals often claim that the cure for crime is to expand social-welfare programs. They say we must first address economic exploitation, male and white supremacy, and homophobia in order to reduce violent crime. Other culprits for ‘mass incarceration’ include a biased legal system, early childhood mistreatment, and draconian drug enforcement. However — in the 1960’s,…
Debt vultures are nothing new in America – especially in health care. Collection firms can buy medical debts for pennies on the dollar, and then they try aggressively to collect the full amount. However, this ugly business model also operates on an international scale. I refer to the ‘Vulture funds’ — who have spent decades…
Podcasts: Arm and a Leg – Practical presentations on how to fight a hospital bill, how to deal with your insurance company, and other ways to fight the high cost of health care. Behind the Bastards – Colorful oral histories of history’s villains, ranging from Caligua to Hitler, Stalin’s Beria, the founder of Scientology, Idi…
To appreciate this statement, one must first wade through the complexity of Medicare accounting. Medicare Part A (hospital insurance) is funded with a tax of 2.90% total on all payroll income, plus an extra .90% on income that exceeds $250,000. For the first thirty years of Medicare, the annual receipts from payroll taxes exceeded the…
A little-known area of financial abuse involves “structured settlement” annuities. A structured settlement is often used in compensation for injuries or accidents – i.e. car crashes, medical malpractice, and class-action lawsuits. The victim is set up to receive their money through periodic payments –this is the ‘structure’. For example, the recipient might get $2,000 a…
Student loan forgiveness can be quite confusing. Here is a brief overview: Back in 2020, the Biden administration announced a plan to forgive $10,000 per debtor, for virtually the entire student debtor population – about 44 million borrowers. (The amount would be $20,000 if a student had been poor enough originally to also receive a…
Karl Denninger has maintained a lively blog called Market Ticker. He is a tech-industry entrepreneur who writes bluntly about politics, technology, and individual rights. If you combined Bernie Sanders with Rush Limbaugh, you might have Karl Denninger. He often speaks about health care…..and on the Market Ticker post of 3-30-2017, he proposed a series of…