U.S. House Resolution 946

The Consumer Overdraft Protection Fair Practices Act.

This bill would enforce laws against the current scrupulous activity banks engage in whereby they order consumer transactions from largest to smallest during processing to maximize overdraft “protection” fees. This process is currently under legal scrutiny even without this bill. It would also make it illegal for banks to approve transactions on debit and Visa “check cards” for which the money is not in the account unless the “overdraft protection” services are applied for by the consumer. Banks currently count on these over-the-limit transactions to maximize overdraft protection fees. The banking industry made 73 billion in such fees during 2006. It was their single largest source of revenue.

In 1999 a class action lawsuit was filed against Bank of America for engaging in the practice of “Biggest Transaction First” transaction and check clearing. They paid a $9 million dollar settlement in this suit without admission of fault and continue the practice until this day. I think more individuals should file suit against this practice, not class action attorneys, because the impact against BoA would be far greater and would receive far more attention than a few law firms cashing out.

Obviously this resolution is going to come under harsh attack by the omni-present and feared banking lobby. May they burn in hell along with all other corporate interest lobby’s.

UPDATE: Consumers who think the current system is unfair should write to the Federal Reserve and complain, and write to their congressional representatives asking them to support the “Consumer Overdraft Protection Fair Practices Act” introduced by Congresswoman Maloney.

It’s been a big week for Logan. He started rolling over all the time, eating cereal, all the big baby stuff. He’s a giggler too. We’re thinking he’ll be crawling withinthe next month. Right now he tries to get his legs under him when he’s on his tummy. Connor never did crawl. He just rolled around and then walked. Logan may have the same problem Connor did with walking because he’s so big.

We moved into the upstairs of our house for awhile because the condenser for our down stairs heat pump blew up trying to keep pace with the heat. It was repaired for only $200. The next day we had a big storm come through that tore up the yard and knocked down trees. I spent the weekend cutting them up with a chainsaw.

I’m thinking of moving this blog to another platform soon. Wordpress is just too cumbersome to post on sometimes. It’s difficult to add pictures and that’s one of the reasons I haven’t been creating more entries lately. If I didn’t have to spend time inserting code manually for correctly formatted images there would be a lot more pictures of the baby on here.

Here’s an artical on the Blue Cross Blue Shieldof NC website about why Moses Cone cancelled their contracts with this major NC health insurance provider. 

http://www.bcbsnc.com/notices/073107-mosescone.cfm

This statement from BCBS underscores my fight to prove that it is NOT the health insurance companies who are responsible for outrageous medical costs, it is the hospital corporations.  I will pose the simple question once again, which no one has ever satisfactorily answered: How can hospital corporations, with a vested interest in shareholder profits, put their patients care above targeted revenues and profitability.  The simple answer no one wants to admit is: They can’t.

An annual double digit increase for inpatient fees based on identical procedures is an outrage.  This markup (ripoff) would not be tolerated in any other consumer industry.  Yet society at large is silent towards hospitals and blames health insurance companies.  If anything the insurance companies are working to control costs.

Amy’s got 99 pictures in her shutterfly album of Logan now.  You can see them all right here:

From an album in Logan’s newborn pictures

You can order prints from the site.  The PW to view the album is: business