Several years ago, an attorney named James Bormes paid a case filing fee via pay.gov, which the federal courts use to facilitate electronic payments. He received an email receipt that included both the last four digits of his credit card’s number and the card’s expiration date. Bormes sued seeking damages under the Fair Credit Reporting […]
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A recent study by Myungho Paik, Bernard Black, and David Hyman finds a significant downward effect from state-law medical-malpractice caps on claim rates and payouts. Here is the abstract: We study the effect of damage caps adopted in the 1990s and 2000s on medical malpractice claim rates and payouts. Prior studies found some evidence that […]
A report issued today by Pennsylvania's auditor general revealed the troubling (if not necessarily surprising) degree to which that state's Department of Environmental Protection has been outmatched by the pace of gas drilling in the state. The report, covering the period 2009-12, portrays a department that is both underresourced and slow or even unwilling to […]
Just hours after a panel the D.C. Circuit held (over a dissent) that the ACA could be read just one way — to forbid health-care premium subsidies in health-care exchanges run by the federal government rather than a state — a panel of the Fourth Circuit (which covers the states of Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, […]
In a 2-1 decision, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has struck down an IRS rule providing subsidies for participants in health-care exchanges in states where the exchanges were established by the federal government, not the states. In other words, according to the court, although Congress intended that the […]
The National Law Journal has an analysis of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as it hits the three-year mark. Among the highlights: Agency lawyers filed at least 20 enforcement actions in the past year (compared with two in the CFPB’s first year), racking up a series of major settlements. Among them: Bank of America in […]
As NPR reports this month, the U.S. economy has finally recovered the number of jobs it had as of January 2008. But they didn't all go back to the places where they were lost. Check out this fascinating graph (and accompanying story) to learn which states rebounded, which didn't, and why.
Manufacturers of home appliances (like Whirlpool) have been sued for misusing the EPA's "Energy Star" label to suggest that products were more energy efficient than they actually were. The industry response has been to try to get Congress to ban such suits. This quote from Shannon Baker-Branstetter of Consumers Union (the publisher of Consumer Reports) […]
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been taking consumer complaints on a wide range of topics for some time now, including mortgage lending, credit reporting, private students, and (more recently) debt collection. The agency announced today that it is now taking complaints concerning prepaid cards and other nonbank products. Here is the agency's press release: […]
We have been providing reports (go, for instance, here) of evidence that the number of Americans lacking health insurance has been dropping as the Affordable Care Act goes into effect. Here is the latest: State insurance officials [in Washington state] say fewer than 9 percent of Washington residents still don't have health insurance. That's a significant […]