The purpose of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is to protect consumers from unfair, deceptive, or abusive financial practices. President Obama signed legislation creating the CFPB in 2010. Since its inception the agency has worked to rein in abusive practices at banks, student loans taken out to attend substandard for-profit universities and abuses at mortgage brokers. Lately the federal agency has taken aim at hospital debt collectors.
Author: Devon Herrick
Federal Agencies Easy to Scam for Ineligible Health Benefits
Federal government bureaucrats love health insurance. It’s almost like a religion. They believe in health insurance for its own sake. If you pay $500 a month for health coverage that you don’t use, that’s fine because someone else in your risk pool will use it. It’s like going to church. You should just do it and the feds encourage it.
Long-Term Medical-Assisted Opioid Treatment Works, but is Underutilized
Last week I wrote that more than 100,000 Americans die every year from drug overdoses in the United States. In the 12-month period ended in September 2023, 111,380 Americans had died. As recently as 2015 the number of Americans overdosing was less than half of recent figure.
Opioids, specifically fentanyl, are most often the cause of overdose deaths. The RAND Corporation released a study that found that 42% of American adults personally know someone who died by overdose. Furthermore, of those four-in-ten adults who know someone who died of an overdose the average number of people they know who died is two.
Young Workers Unemployed Due to Poor Health More than Previous Generations
It’s almost a running joke among Baby Boomers and Gen X that Generation Z and Millennials are slackers. Gen Z and younger Millennials are more likely to be underemployed, live with their parents or receive financial support from their parents than previous generations, at least according to some recent surveys. Now a new study found that 20-somethings are also more likely to suffer unemployment due to ill health than previous generations of young workers. Indeed, 20-somethings are more likely to be unemployed due to health issues than workers twice their age.