USDA to school lunch ladies: less fries, more fruit – National Consumers League

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The days of Mystery Meat Mondays may soon be over for schoolchildren across the nation. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is proposing new guidelines for school lunches subsidized by the federal government, the first major nutritional overhaul in 15 years.

The new guidelines would require schools to drastically lower the amount of sodium in school meals, limit children to one cup of starchy vegetables (such as French fries) per week, and increase servings of fruit, whole grains, and low-fat milk.

The requirements are based on the 2009 recommendations by the Institute of Medicine that advocated reducing sugar, saturated fat, and sodium but increasing protein and whole grains.

Following these recommendations, the new USDA guidelines would:

  • Establish the first calorie limits for school meals
  • Ban trans fats
  • Reduce the amount of sodium in school meals by 50 percent over a 10-year period
  • Gradually increase the amount of whole grains required
  • Require both a grain and protein served for breakfast
  • Require more servings of fruits and vegetables
  • Require all milk to be either low-fat or non-fat

A before-and-after comparison of the new lunch standards can be viewed here

The proposal arrives at a critical time for America’s youth. According to the USDA, roughly one-third of children between 6 and 19 years old are overweight or obese, and the number of obese children has tripled over the past few decades. Obesity, a serious health concern in its own right, often leads to other problematic and hard-to-treat medical conditions such as diabetes and sleep apnea.

Experts argue that improving the nutritional value of school meals would be a giant step toward a healthier America. According to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, the new guidelines could affect more than 32 million children, an impressive number given that children consume more than half of their calories at school.

Although these guidelines are just a proposal and implementation could be far off, the Obama administration has been moving quickly on the nutrition issue; today’s announcement comes just a few weeks after President Obama signed the $4.5 billion Healthy Hunger-Free Kinds Act of 2010 that required the new nutritional standards and helps schools pay for healthier foods.

The USDA is seeking feedback on the proposed rule at www.regulations.gov through April 13, 2011.

Digging through decades of a family estate – National Consumers League

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By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

I spent the holidays combing through family papers and heirlooms in my family’s home in Minneapolis. My siblings and I were cleaning out the home we grew up in, a house that has been in the family for more than 70 years. Among the items I had to deal with was my childhood coin collection. I loved the books that held the Buffalo nickels, the Lady Liberty dime, the gorgeous silver Lady Liberty Dollars, and the Indian Head Pennies. I never had an impressive or valuable collection, but I used to enjoy sorting through the coins and looking at the often-hard-to-read dates. But I didn’t want to transport the coins back to my home in Washington, DC – nickels, dimes, and quarters are heavy! So I brought them to a rare coin dealer I found on the Web to see if any had value and whether I could sell them back.

I sat down with one of the experts, who looked through the coins and told me that none of them was terribly valuable, but the older ones did have some silver content. Silver prices have soared in recent months for reasons I don’t fully understand. My expert was taking notes, keeping numbers on what I had. I figured, given that the coins were not themselves valuable, I’d get $20-30 for the collection. Next thing I know he’s sending me upstairs to the bank with a check for $328! That is how much the silver in the older coins was worth.  I was astonished and delighted at getting this unexpected windfall. I must admit, however, that I feel a little sad that I no longer can look through those beautiful Buffalo nickels.

My siblings and I are holding an estate sale at the home in Minneapolis. I didn’t realize how useful these events are – not just for those who are looking for furniture and other items at bargain prices, but for the family. After more than 70 years in the house, our family collection of furniture and clothing is overwhelming. I had tried in recent visits to dispose of my mother’s designer bags, hats, and dresses and my father’s drawers of Brooks Brother’s shirts and bookcases of hardcover books. We did donate many of my mother’s designer dresses to the University of Minnesota’s school of fashion and design, but the other possessions are just too numerous.

And the problem with the vintage clothing or used book stores is they give you a pittance when you bring them in individually – $2 or an item or for a whole box of books, when you bring them in individually – yet they will turn around and sell them (particularly vintage clothes), for a lot of money. The advantage of an estate sale is that the folks running it will price the items much higher and the vintage/used book/antique stores will pay a much fairer price. The estate sale company then keeps 25 percent of the gross and the family gets the rest, minus the cost of advertising the sale. It’s a win/win for both buyers and families.

One caveat, however: as with all consumer services, you have to do your homework and use care in choosing the estate sale company. Find one that comes well recommended and will carefully cull through your family belongings, ferreting out first edition books or money found in pockets of coats and turn these items over to you. Then they come in, spend five or so days marking items and setting them out for display, and hold the sale, often both days of a weekend. The stuff that doesn’t go the first day gets discounted.

For families, it’s a manageable way to discard the decades of belongings that pile up and offers estate sale shoppers an affordable alternative to lamps, rugs, and furniture.

Saferproducts.gov a big win for consumers – National Consumers League

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A child falls off a bike with faulty handlebars. A toddler gets injured in a poorly designed stroller. An entire family becomes ill from their home’s toxic drywall. The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) collects thousands of safety incident reports like these each year, but never before have those complaints been made public.

All that is set to change in March of 2011, when the CPSC will launch its new public complaint database, *www.saferproducts.gov, and will allow consumers to post and view safety reports of products that fall under the agency’s jurisdiction (the CPSC does not oversee products like cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, cars, or tires).

The CPSC’s decision to make all its complaints public, as required by the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008, was immediately celebrated by consumer rights advocates as a valuable resource in helping consumers make informed decisions about the safety of the products they buy.

Major manufactures have been less enthusiastic about the plan. In a *recent Washington Post article, Rosario Palmieri, vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers, voiced concern that the database will subject businesses to inaccurate and malicious reports by competitors or fanatical consumers who intentionally want to damage a brand.

This argument seems weak in light of the popularity of user-generated review sites like Yelp and Angie’s List, where it’s relatively easy to weed out the rantings of disgruntled employees or bitter competitors from more legitimate complaints.

A concern with considerable more weight is the fact that, as a government agency, the CPSC carries a lot of clout; a negative report posted by a government-sponsored site could be much more damaging than complaints posted in less official channels. To prevent this, the CPSC has implemented a variety of safeguards to ensure public postings don’t recklessly damage a brand’s reputation:

  • When a consumer files a complaint, the CPSC has five days to notify the manufacturer
  • The manufacturer then has 10 days to respond
  • If a company believes the complaint is false or gives away a trade secret, the CPSC will make a decision of whether or not to publish it
  • If the report is published, the manufacturer still has the opportunity to write a response that will be published alongside the complaint

*www.saferproducts.gov has the potential to be an effective early warning system that saves lives and injury by alerting customers to potential dangers—long before the years and months it can take the CPSC and manufacturer to coordinate a successful recall.

*Links are no longer active as the original sources have removed the content, sometimes due to federal website changes or restructurings

Are the IRS’s aggressive tactics hurting taxpayers? Internal report says yes – National Consumers League

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National Taxpayer Advocate Nina E. Olson released her annual report to Congress today, urging the Internal Revenue Service to reconsider its policy on penalizing struggling taxpayers with tax liens and identifying the need for tax reform as “the number one priority in tax administration.”

A tax lien is a claim the government files against a taxpayer’s property as collateral for money owed. A lien helps ensure that the government has priority over other creditors. Even if the taxpayer has no current assets, a lien still gives the government a claim on future assets.

According to the in-house report, the problem is that the IRS’s aggressive use of liens is hurting taxpayers by pushing them further into debt, damaging their credit, and harming their employment and property rental opportunities.

Olson takes issue with the fact that — despite the global economic recession, high unemployment and a real estate crisis — the IRS has not changed its policy on regularly imposing liens on delinquent taxpayers.

By making it harder for taxpayers to get back on their feet, the IRS might actually be shooting itself in the foot, ultimately reducing long-term tax collections, according to the new report.

The IRS filed 1.1 million tax liens in 2010 fiscal year, compared to the 522,887 it filed in 2005. Though lien filings have soared over the past 11 years, revenue brought in through the IRS collection program “has remained flat,” Olson wrote.

IRS shortsighted in not recognizing breast pumps as disease prevention tools – National Consumers League

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NCL recently sent the following letter to the Internal Revenue Service, calling for change with the way the IRS doesn’t classify breast pumps for breast-feeding moms as an item (under IRS Publication 502) that can be reimbursed because they aid in the  “prevention of disease” — an outrageous idea to health advocates who cite numerous data about the proven reduction in health risks to both nursing moms and babies. The letter originally appeared in the Disruptive Women in Health Care blog.

December 29, 2010

Dear Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Douglas H. Shulman:

The National Consumers League has been advocating on behalf of women and children’s health since our founding in 1899. We were therefore very concerned to read about the IRS’ decision to deny nursing mothers the ability to use  their tax-sheltered health care accounts to pay for breast pumps and other supplies. Under IRS regulations, eligible medical expenses under the flex programs.

According to IRS Publication 502, items that can be reimbursed  include those that aid in the  “prevention of disease.” The IRS apparently has inexplicably determined that breastfeeding does not help in the “prevention of disease.” The National Consumers League could not disagree more with this determination. We ask that you review and reverse this misguided decision. Indeed, the medical evidence is overwhelming that far more widespread breastfeeding would not only “prevent disease” in the United States, but would save our health care system billions of dollars.

Consider the following evidence about the myriad health benefits to both mother and child of breastfeeding:

  • According to a Harvard study published in April of this year, if 90 percent of US families would comply with medical recommendationsto breastfeed exclusively for 6 months, the United States wouldsave $13 billion per year and prevent an excess 911 deaths,nearly all of which would be among infants ($10.5 billion and 741deaths at 80 percent compliance).
  • The risk of infant death due to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) is lowered, and respiratory infections such as pneumonia, and necrotizing enterocolitis is nearly eliminated if mothers breastfeed their infants until at least six months after birth.
  • The US Department of Health and Human Services has found that  breastfed infants have a lower risk of contracting ear infections, stomach viruses, atopic dermatitis, type 1 and 2 diabetes, childhood leukemia, and other health problems.
  • Mothers also benefit from breastfeeding because of lower risk of contracting type 2 diabetes, breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and postpartum depression (PPD).
  • A former acting Surgeon General, Steven Galson, has noted that for most women, breastfeeding is biologically possible. Both babies and mothers gain many benefits from breastfeeding. Breast milk is easy to digest and contains antibodies that can protect infants from bacterial and viral infections.
  • Breastfed infants typically need fewer sick care visits, Congress recently acknowledged the importance of breastfeeding in the landmark health care reform legislation it enacted this year by requiring that workplaces provide women with a private place to nurse or use a breast pump.

As  Dr. Robert W. Block, president-elect of the American Academy of Pediatrics noted in the New York Times this week “The old adage that breast-feeding is a child’s first immunization really is true … So we need to do everything we can to remove the barriers that make it difficult.”

We agree with Dr. Block. We need to encourage, not discourage, barriers to widespread breastfeeding. Unfortunately, the IRS determination NOT to allow parents to use their tax-sheltered flex accounts to cover the cost of breast pumps has the impact of further discouraging  women  from breast-feeding and directly undermines what is by every measure a critical practice for improved public health.  We ask that you, as IRS Commissioner, review this decision and, in light of the overwhelming evidence, reverse it. We believe the cost of breast pumps should and must be a covered cost in these flex plans.

Thank you for your attention to our concerns.

Sincerely,

Sally Greenberg
Executive Director, National Consumers League

Cc:

Senate HELP Committee Chairman Tom Harkin
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner
Surgeon General Regina Benjamin
House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman

Resolve to be a better consumer in 2011 – National Consumers League

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By John Breyault, Vice President of Public Policy, Telecommunications and Fraud

The start of a new year inevitably means many people will be making New Year’s resolutions. Some of the more common resolutions include spending more time with family and friends, getting into shape, quitting smoking, or getting more organized. Unfortunately, according to researchers, while more than half of consumers believe that they will fulfill their resolutions, just 12 percent will actually be successful.

As consumer advocates, we frequently preach the value of setting small, defined and achievable goals. For example, instead of resolving to get out of debt in a single year (a goal that many make, but few achieve), resolve to allocate an extra $30-50 per month towards paying down debt. In this way, you achieve success early (you’re 8.3 percent of the way to your yearly goal there after the first month!), creating a small victory and incentivizing additional work towards the goal.

So, in honor of 2011, here are 11 achievable goals that consumers can resolve to accomplish in the New Year.

 

  1. Pay 1 percent more on top of your minimum monthly mortgage payment. Doing so on a typical 30-year fixed rate mortgage could knock months and hundreds (or thousands) of dollars off the cost of the loan over its lifetime.
  2. Don’t make any online purchases from a company you haven’t researched with the Better Business Bureau. BBB.org is a wealth of information on online and “brick and mortar” companies, including complaints made and resolved. Don’t shop online without it!
  3. Pay more than the minimum monthly payment on your credit cards. Credit card interest rates are often in excess of 10 percent and may be 20 percent or more. Unless your investments are returning profits at a greater rate than your credit card interest rates, it makes a lot of sense to “invest” in paying down high-interest debt.
  4. Check your credit report at least twice. Consumers are entitled to a free credit report from each of the major credit reporting agencies once per year. While these reports may not give you your credit score for free, you can see if there are old accounts or incorrect information that you can fix and (hopefully) improve your credit score. This small step could save you thousands on home or auto loans where credit scores play a big role in interest rates.
  5. Do a “communications audit” once per year. Most consumers subscribe to some combination of cable TV, wireless phone, wired phone (with local and long distance) and broadband Internet service. At least once a year, gather the bills for these services and total up what you’re paying for all of them. Then do an honest appraisal of what you actually use. Many consumer will find that they use their cell phones for most long distance calls and don’t need a second long distance plan on their home phone service. Other consumers may find that they rarely watch premium movie channels and can drop them from their cable package.
  6. Add any new phone numbers to the federal “Do Not Call” list. Consumers who change residence, switch carriers, or get new cell phones may also get new phone numbers. If you want to limit telemarketing calls to these numbers, consider visiting www.donotcall.gov to add these new numbers to the “Do Not Call” registry. Extra Credit: Some states maintain their own “do not call” lists. Check with your state government to see if such a list exists and add numbers to that as well.
  7. Have a “shredding party!” Consumers tend to accumulate lots of paper, including bills, credit card offers, account statements and other materials, which may contain lots of personally identifying information. These can become fodder for identity thieves. Invest in a good shredder then invite friends over with their bills, credit card offers, etc. and shred away. Here’s a great guide to throwing your own “shredding party.”
  8. Create a household budget. It’s tremendously difficult to pay down debt if you aren’t living within your means to begin with. For most people, creating a simple personal or family budget is the first step in figuring out what their “means” are. This doesn’t have to be as tedious as it sounds, and having a good handle on the money coming in and going out of family accounts can actually relieve a lot of stress. The BBB has a great guide for creating a budget *here.
  9. Increase your 401(k) contribution by 1 percent. Many consumers may have been turned off on investing after the recent economic meltdown. However, you still need to save for retirement, and – for most consumers – that means investing in a 401(k) plan. By increasing your contribution by just 1 percent, you probably won’t miss the money and you’ll be investing in your future.
  10. Check your privacy settings on Facebook. Let’s face it: It seems like more of us are on Facebook these days than aren’t. Unfortunately, most users never take a look at their privacy settings. You may be sharing more of your personal information with marketers and other users than you’d like. Check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s step-by-step guide to maximizing your privacy on Facebook.
  11. Don’t give to a charity you haven’t checked out first. The holidays are a season ripe for charity scams – where unscrupulous fraudsters use the names of respected charities to con consumers out of their money. Fortunately, a number of online resources are available to help consumers check out a charity ahead of time, including GuideStar.org, CharityNavigator.org and Give.org. For more tips on avoiding charity scams, check out our tip page by clicking here.

*Links are no longer active as the original sources have removed the content, sometimes due to federal website changes or restructurings.

New research showing lack of progress on patient safety front a disturbing trend – National Consumers League

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By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

Patient safety should be a paramount consideration when someone is admitted to the hospital, but new research is discouraging on that front. Researchers looked at 10 North Carolina hospitals over the 2002-2007 period. They found many problems. About 18 percent of patients were harmed by medical care, some more than once, and 63.1 percent of injuries were preventable. Most problems patients faced were temporary, but some were serious, and 2.4 percent caused or contributed to a patient’s death.

The thing that is so discouraging is that, in 1999 when an Institute of Medicine report – entitled “To Err is Human” – found that up to 98,000 people each year die, and more than one million people are injured because of medical errors, the medical community made a commitment to try to make a dent in these numbers. It appears that things for consumers and patients haven’t improved much.

Common problems appeared when hospitals failed to use measures proven to avert hazards from devices like urinary catheters, ventilators, and lines inserted into veins and arteries. Medication errors caused problems in 162 cases – computerized systems for ordering drugs can cut such mistakes by 80 percent, the researchers found, but only 17 percent of hospitals have such systems.

These errors not only injure people, but they cost the health care system a bundle. The report estimated that these errors cost Medicare several billion dollars a year. Not only that, but researchers estimate that these numbers are vastly underestimated because reporting medical errors is voluntary.

Latest report on women’s health not pretty – National Consumers League

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By Mimi Johnson, Director of NCL Health Policy

The National Women’s Law Center and Oregon Health and Science University recently issued its latest report card on the health of women, and it wasn’t pretty.

The United States received an overall grade of “unsatisfactory” and failed to meet many of the government’s Healthy People 2010 goals.

Some of the biggest problems facing women in the United States? Women are binge drinking, or downing more than five drinks at a single occasion, far more than before. In addition to partaking in riskier behaviors, women are seeking screening for such things as cervical cancer far less than before. This can be very dangerous, especially as rates sexually transmitted diseases such as chlamydia are on the rise.

Women today are more obese and have more serious chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension than only a few years ago. The report found that one-quarter of women in this country get no physical activity, and the overwhelming majority of women do not eat five fruits and vegetables a day.

Is there hope? The Affordable Care Act prohibits insurance policies from discriminating based on gender or pre-existing conditions, and helps extend Medicaid eligibility to millions of Americans. The Act also allots substantial funding for prevention. One of the major advancements is the elimination of co-pays for preventive services. It might be possible to inch closer to nation’s goal of 90 percent screening rates for pap smears, increase the effective use of mammography, and continue to help women to smoke and drink less with fewer financial and systemic barriers in our way.

So let’s go far a walk, put down the bottle, get to the doctor, and work together to make sure we fare better on the next report card!

Thought you were done with the mall? – National Consumers League

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Think again. Many of us will be back there tomorrow, bright and early, to take advantage of after-Christmas sales or – gulp – try to return well-intentioned gifts that didn’t go over so great. Are you ready for your returns? Tips from the experts:

  • Know a store’s return policy before you go back. Know what you’re getting into — whether the return will be in the form of cash or store credit, at full price, the price that was paid by the purchaser, or some more recent marked-down price. Know whether having the receipt factors into this so you can decide whether politely going back to the gift giver to ask for the receipt is warranted.
  • Keep a paper trail. Find your receipts and keep them handy. Having a receipt dramatically increases the chances of an outcome that’s to your liking.
  • Don’t open the packaging of anything you know you don’t want to keep, particularly electronics. Policies that don’t allow returns for opened electronics items are common. If they do take it back, they may withhold a certain percentage of the return price and call it a “restocking fee.”
  • Spend your gift cards. They may lose value over time, so look at the fine print and spend them before they expire.
  • Prepare yourself for the worst. Stores have been tracking customers’ return habits for years. Some retailers subscribe to services that keep track of what consumers are purchasing and bringing back in an attempt to curb consumer return fraud — the returning of stolen goods. For honest consumers, this can cause problems, as some stores limit the amount of return activity to a certain number or value of annual merchandise returns. There’s a possibility if you’ve returned a lot of merchandise, you’ll be denied.
  • Be smart. Don’t wear it. Don’t damage it. Increase the chance of having a successful return by taking care of the item on its way back to the store and being a pleasant, polite customer. The holidays are stressful enough. Don’t contribute with a less-likely-to-be-helped attitude.

Too many households neglecting life insurance – National Consumers League

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By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

A recent industry review of Americans purchasing life insurance showed a startling trend: the number of American households with life insurance was at its lowest in 50 years.  The drop in insurance is tied directly to the economic downturn, Today only 44 percent of households have an individual life insurance policy, and 30 percent have no individual- or employer-provided life insurance. The study was done by LIMRA, an industry life insurance think-tank and research arm. The study found that 11 million households with children younger than 18, which are the families with the greatest need for coverage, have no life insurance.

Life insurance is part of a social safety net. It protects surviving spouses and children when the sole breadwinner or other income earners in a family dies. Ironically, the cost of life insurance has dropped over the past several decades. A 35-year-old healthy male can purchase life insurance for $25 a month for a 20-year-term policy that would pay $500,000 upon his death, according to statistics from ING. But nevertheless in tough economic times, life insurance seems like a luxury. In truth it is not. It is a necessity for all working families trying to watch out for unforeseen events.

Insurance companies need to do outreach, to let consumers know that term life insurance is affordable. But insurance companies need also to guarantee that premiums and fees will be reasonable and that consumers can make a good investment without fearing they will be ripped off in any way.

This is an area of great concern: ensuring that consumers are taking advantage of relatively inexpensive life insurance to protect their families in the event that they will no longer be around. The life insurance industry has a lot of work to do to get the word out – and to work closely with consumers so that they can understand the critical importance a good solid life insurance policy can have on protecting the interests of American families.