One of the key components of the new Affordable Care Act is its medical loss ratio rule. The rule seeks to control health care costs by requiring medical insurers who don't spend at least 80 to 85 percent of their premium earnings on health care — rather than on marketing and administrative expenses — to […]
Why do courts enforce mandatory arbitration clauses? Because the contracting parties agreed to them, the courts tell us. Not this time. A Florida intermediate appellate court held earlier this month that an arbitration clause was enforceable in a wrongful death suit against a rehabilitation center even though Jessie Holloway, the 92-year-old woman who signed the […]
From a DOJ press release: "Lender Processing Services Inc. (LPS), a publicly traded mortgage servicing company based in Jacksonville, Fla., has agreed to pay $35 million in criminal penalties and forfeiture to address its participation in a six-year scheme to prepare and file more than 1 million fraudulently signed and notarized mortgage-related documents with property […]
by Jeff Sovern The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is a bank regulator that, like the CFPB, has a single head rather than a commission structure and gets its funding outside the appropriations process. I have pointed out before two things about this: first, that unlike with the CFPB, Republicans have been happy […]
by Brian Wolfman We have posted before on the large decline in airfares in light of the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act. (See also the chart to the right, and click on it to enlarge.) But, in this piece, David Lazarus questions whether economic deregulation ever brings consumers lasting benefit. He worries about the just-announced U.S. […]
by Brian Wolfman This article by the Consumerist's Chris Morran explains that, in her first Senate Banking Committee hearing, senior Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren "grilled a panel of regulators on their tendency to settle with law-breaking banks rather than go to trial. … Sen. Warren explained her stance that if banks reap billions of profits […]
In light of the steady march toward maximum judicial enforcement of arbitration clauses, perhaps nothing should surprise us anymore, but a recent federal district court decision caught the eyes of several of us here at CL&P Blog. This decision, from the Southern District of Ohio, ruled that a dispute was subject to arbitration even though […]
Here's the email they sent out: Good afternoon, We need your help to figure out what’s the deal with financial products marketed to students, like debit cards and checking accounts. Email us at CFPB_StudentsFedReg@cfpb.gov by March 18 to tell us about any aspect of your experience. That may include: Signing up for the card or account […]
Carolyn Dessin of Akron has written Arbitrability and Vulnerability, 21 Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review, 349 (2012). Here's the abstract: Arbitration is cool. Everybody's doing it. In the eighty-five years since the passage of the Federal Arbitration Act, that seems to be the prevailing sentiment. Recent decades have seen the meteoric rise of […]
Remember the Big Spring suit? That's the case challenging various provisions of the Dodd-Frank Wall St. reform law, including the legality of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, on separation-of-powers grounds. That suit includes, but is by no means limited to, a challenge to Richard Cordray's appointment as CFPB director as an impermissible (non-)recess appointment. The […]