2008: Day Six – National Consumers League

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by NCL staff

Here we are, less than a week into 2008. How are your new year’s resolutions holding up? Whether you have kept them all, or have resolved not to make any resolutions, we figured you might be interested in some tips to help start the year off right.

Determined to finally lose those extra pounds? Do so healthfully. Did your holiday spending get out of hand? Notice an error on your credit report? Check out NCL’s tips here. Vowed to help others more? Volunteerism can take many forms. Consider helping out at your state or the National LifeSmarts competition. Or, donate to NCL!

Do you want more ideas on how you can stay healthy, avoid scams, and make smart decisions overall as a consumer? Check out NCL’s 2008 Consumer Calendar online.

Here’s to a happy and healthy 2008!

NCL in the Land Down Under: Sally Meets with Australian Product Safety Compliance Official – National Consumers League

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by Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

G’Day!

While traveling in Australia this week, I met with a colleague who works the product safety beat for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, (ACCC) the Australian government’s official consumer protection and enforcement agency. Gail O’Bryen, Director of Product Safety Compliance, and I have worked together on product safety issues for a number of years. Not surprisingly this year, Australia, like the United States and Europe, has had to grapple with the danger of lead in toys. Australia effectively banned lead in toys so that no toy may have more than .06 parts per million of lead.

Gail also noted that the ACCC expects to set a standard for buggies and strollers after several incidents when these nursery products lead to shocking incidents of injury or death of small children. In several instances, strollers without a braking system rolled away into water or traffic. The ACCC expects to see improved standards for strollers and buggies in the near future.

Finally, the ACCC will likely have a standard for self-extinguishing cigarettes before the end of the year. This is something the United States has adopted in some states, but there has never been a federal standard for fire-safe cigarettes, despite the work of the Consumer Product Safety Commission on the issue. The ACCC works on a vast number of consumer issues, and product safety is only a facet of what this government enforcement agency does for Aussies. Nevertheless, the product and toy safety issue has received the full attention of the Commission.

Learning what colleagues in other countries are doing to address concerns about hazardous products – many of them the same or similar products, like toys, cigarettes, or strollers – has always proved valuable to our work on these and other consumer protection issues.

Hooroo!

Sweepstakes Scams Continue to Thrive – National Consumers League

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by Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

Last month we blogged about the results we’ve been seeing from our national public education project on fake check scams.  Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with another consumer who we’ve been able to help.

The consumer had been receiving sweepstakes “winning notifications” in the mail for six months, and was buying money orders twice a week – convinced that sending her money would pay off. A banker from her small Texas town suspected that her 80-year old customer might be falling victim to a sweepstakes scam, and contacted NCL’s Fraud Center.

When I spoke with the consumer (who we’ll call “Ms. Jones”), she described the situation to me as such: the first letter she received was from Levittown, New York, from a sweepstakes prize claim office, indicating to her that she’d won millions of dollars in a lottery. The winnings would be hers soon, but first Ms. Jones needed to send in $18 for processing fees to claim her prize. The 80-year-old eagerly did as she was told, and sent in a check for $18. Soon she received another letter, asking for a slightly larger amount to “claim her prize” – but still not enough to set off signals. The letters always included deadlines, urging Ms. Jones to send the necessary fees quickly in order to collect the prizes she’d won.

In the following months, Ms. Jones received what she described to me as “stacks” of letters from very professional-seeming operations telling her she was just one more check away from cashing in on her prize. The woman, who lives on a fixed income, reluctantly admitted to having sent away hundreds of dollars in attempts to claim her prize, little by little. When Jones’ banker noticed the trend of small but regular withdrawals to her account, she intervened.

A staffer from NCL’s Fraud Center immediately followed up with the consumer, and explained that she was being duped, as you will never have to pay money to “win” money from a legitimate company or operation.

Unfortunately, this consumer’s story is not that unique. In fact, we hear from many older consumers – or their children or grandchildren – about scams perpetrated against them because many con artists have identified seniors as a vulnerable group. They often find it more difficult to hang up on predatory telemarketers, and they can end up being bilked, bit by bit, out of hundreds or thousands of dollars.

This gets us steamed, and that’s why we are committed to raising awareness about such Telemarketing and Internet Scams. We tell consumers that there is no legitimate reason why anyone would give you a check or money order and ask you to send back any money in return. No matter the details of the scam — whether they’re trying to purchase something from you, asking for your help moving money around, or saying you’ve won a foreign lottery—it’s a scam.

Consumers can report scams online to NCL’s Fraud Center here.

Health IT: growing interests and concerns – National Consumers League

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Many assume that the health care system in the United States is the best in the world — at least for those who are able to access it. The reality for many people is that our system often fails to deliver quality care, misses many people who need care the most, and suffers from significant inefficiencies that lead to high costs. Even according to conservative estimates, hospital errors are the nation’s eighth leading cause of death — ahead of breast cancer, AIDS and motor vehicle accidents combined.

Preventable medical errors include a wide variety of examples: misidentification of patients; misreading of tests; medication errors, equipment failures; and hospital-acquired infections. Researchers have estimated that your chance of getting the right care at the right time is only slightly more than 50 percent — and it’s worse for women and minorities!

Unfortunately, low-quality health care means high-priced consequences. The combination of overuse, misuse, and underuse accounts for up to 30 percent of our national health care expenditures. Improving the quality of care would make Americans healthier and help us address the skyrocketing costs. With that goal in mind, many policy makers, businesses, health care providers, and provider institutions (such as hospitals) are looking to health information technology (HIT) as a way to improve health care quality.

HIT represents a transition from paper-based to computer-based transactions for health care services. For patients, it can mean that doctors use computers to keep track of patient health information, rather than traditional paper charts. These electronic medical records can help health care providers stay organized and make better clinical decisions. Much of the real value to patients and providers is seen only when multiple providers (and ideally the patient) are able to share medical information electronically whenever and wherever it is needed. This concept is often referred to as health information exchange, or HIE.

Appropriately implemented, HIE has the potential to provide consumers with information to make better decisions about their own health care and the care of their loved ones. An electronic health record that could be accessed by authorized parties would mean that health care providers would be able to access the information they need (medications, lab results, allergies) to make better health care decisions.

While all of this is possible, there are potential risks. Understandably, many consumers are afraid that broader sharing of their personal health information will only make it more vulnerable to unwanted and unintended exposure, which could have significant life-long consequences for their personal, social, and financial wellbeing. While NCL is very supportive of moving forward with health information technology and exchange systems, these initiatives will only succeed if all consumers can be confident that their personal health information is being handled in a secure, appropriate, and confidential manner.

NCL is part of a growing consumer coalition dedicated to seeing that these and other essential conditions are built in to systems emerging across the country. This is a critical time for consumer involvement, as efforts to promote nationwide adoption of health information technology are proceeding rapidly. There is a significant need for strong consumer voices at all levels of this effort — voices that strongly support the promise of health information technology to improve our healthcare system, but that will work to ensure adequate consumer protections.