As you'll recall, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) significantly expanded Medicaid — the War on Poverty legislation that had, for decades, provided comprehensive medical insurance to (certain) poor people. Among other things, the ACA Medicaid expansion required state Medicaid programs to cover all adults with incomes below 133 percent of the federal poverty level. Before […]
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"Equifax has agreed to pay as much as $700 million to settle a series of state and federal investigations into a massive 2017 data breach that left more than 147 million Americans’ Social Security numbers, credit-card details and other sensitive information exposed. The punishment includes payments to affected consumers, fines to peeved regulators and a […]
The Sixth Circuit held today in Keen v. Helson that because the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act's text gives a right to sue only to a "borrower," someone who signs the mortgage but does not sign the mortgage loan with the lender is not a "borrower" (and so can't sue under RESPA).
This Washington Post article by Faiz Siddiqui explains that "Tesla is racing to be first to the market with a self-driving car made for the masses, promising to send as soon as this year an over-the-air software update that will turn hundreds of thousands of its vehicles into robo-cars." Yet, "a dozen transportation officials and […]
In a lengthy article today, the Detroit Free Press reports: Ford Motor Co. knowingly launched two low-priced, fuel-efficient cars with defective transmissions and continued selling the troubled Focus and Fiesta despite thousands of complaints and an avalanche of repairs, a Free Press investigation found. The cars, many of which randomly lose power on freeways and have […]
On Tuesday, AT&T became the first major US wireless company to automatically block robocalls for its customers. The free service comes after a June ruling by the Federal Communications Commission that allows phone service providers to offer call-blocking on an opt-out basis. CNN has the story, here.
Under the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003 (FACTA), retailers are prohibited from printing more than the last 5 digits of a credit card number or the expiration date on a purchase receipt. The law was enacted to combat identity theft, because receipts other could provide criminals with easy access to credit and […]
Our readers will want to read the Ninth Circuit's decision in Blair v. Rent-A-Center, written by Circuit Judge William Fletcher. Judge Fletcher's intro paragraph sums up the decision nicely: In McGill v. Citibank, N.A., 393 P.3d 85 (Cal. 2017), the California Supreme Court decided that a contractual agreement purporting to waive a party’s right to […]
Following up on our post a few days ago about the petition by #REPRESENT asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate "surveillance scoring" — where retailers use consumer information collected by data brokers to figure out how much to charge individual customers. Go here to read #REPRESENT's press release. And go here, here, and here […]
The question presented in this brand-new cert petition is Whether the vesting of substantial executive authority in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an independent agency led by a single director, violates the separation of powers.