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Blog Post
5/24/2011
By Judy Dugan
Can you hear Blue Cross screaming in the distance? Vermont is about to hit the road toward a real (if modified) single-payer health care--Medicare, but for everyone. Cut out the middlemen, save some money, cover more people.
In Washington, insurance companies are deploying their lobbying might to chip apart the gargantuan federal health reform...
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Blog Post
10/14/2011
By Judy Dugan
OilWatchdog and other critics of commodity speculation have long said that rampant speculation in oil futures markets has hurt families, cost jobs and kept the U.S. economy teetering on the edge of recession. Energy analyst Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America, in a nailed-down new study, finds that speculators are adding...
Blog Post
3/8/2011
By Jamie Court
While skirmishes in Libya and uncertainty in the Middle East are nice cover for outrageous gasoline prices, the fact is the same old suspects are making a killing from sky-high gas prices approaching $4 dollars per gallon in California: big oil companies and greedy speculators.
The speculative market may have driven crude oil prices up, but...
Blog Post
10/13/2011
By Doug Heller
It is a masterful spin by the self-described not-for-profit Blue Shield of California to announce that it is returning all but two percent of its profits to its customers, as though this were some act of humble generosity. It’s a little like a supermarket announcing that from now on it’s going to give back (almost) all of your...
Video
3/10/2011
On KGTV - ABC Channel 10 in San Diego, CA, Consumer Watchdog's Jamie Court discusses why the spike in gas prices - especially in California - has nothing to do with civil unrest, and everything to do with profiteering.
Blog Post
4/11/2011
By Judy Dugan
The retiring CEO of health insurance company Aetna walked away with $72 million in total compensation for 2010 alone, after just five years in the job. That's on top of the $85 million CEO Ron Williams recieved in the previous five years--including $38 million in 2008. Every penny of that ultimately comes from the pockets of Aetna's...
Blog Post
8/23/2011
By John M. Simpson
Facebook apparently is beginning to understand that users of the social networking site care about their privacy and would like simple control over who can read which posts. It took long enough, but new privacy controls announced Tuesday give users much clearer options.
Whether the move is a response to the more friendly privacy controls...
Blog Post
6/13/2011
By Judy Dugan
Sometimes it takes just a couple of numbers to clarify a huge, complex issue--In this case, what to do about Medicare. Medicare costs are up 400% since 1969--scary, right? But private health insurance premiums in the same period are up 700%--nearly twice as scary.
In today's New York Times, economist and columnist Paul Krugman...
Blog Post
8/17/2011
By Judy Dugan
FICO, the company that decides your credit score, is now predicting, for profit, whether you're likely to take your prescription drugs on schedule. No matter why FICO says they're doing it (insurance companies are their obvious clients) this is wrong in so many ways that it's hard to know where to start.
For one thing,...
Blog Post
8/25/2011
By Jamie Court
The San Francisco Chronicle reported this morning on the front page about the landmark insurance reform we expect to be spending the next fifteen months working for.
Insurance companies, the legislature and recent court rulings have all turned against consumers, much like they had in 1988, when California voters struck back with the...
