Good News: Medicare Bill Passes in the Senate – National Consumers League

/in /by

By Catherine Bourque, NCL Health Intern

This summer, Catherine has interned in the health policy department at the National Consumers League. She’s from Washington, DC and, this fall, will begin her senior year at Cornell University, where she’s studying Government and Spanish.

About a month ago, both houses of Congress voted to override President Bush’s veto of HR 6331, the Medicare Physician Payment Bill, which stopped pay reductions to physicians treating Medicare patients. We at the National Consumers League support the passage of the bill. It will be crucial to protecting the healthcare of senior citizens across the country who would have been denied care had Congress not taken action to protect this important program and the providers who make the program possible.

Some background: on July 1st, a 10 percent reduction in the pay rate to Medicare physicians went into effect, leading many physicians to stop accepting Medicare patients for cost reasons and making it difficult for many senior citizens to find physicians who would. The Medicare bill will delay the 10 percent deduction for 18 months, financing the continued payments to physicians with a reduction in payment to the Medicare Advantage program, the Medicare health plan program.

After both the House of Representatives and the Senate voted by veto-proof margins to pass the bill, President Bush followed through on his threat to veto the bill, citing that the bill would hurt the Medicare Advantage program. The Medicare Advantage program provides flexibility for Medicare beneficiaries to enroll in private insurance programs.

The House overrode the veto by a vote of 383 to 41, with 24 more Republicans voting in favor of the bill. Similarly, in the Senate, the veto was overridden by a vote of 70 to 26 with 21 Republicans voting to override the veto. While not a permanent fix for the Medicare payment system, the passage of this bill shows Congress’s commitment to providing care for the elderly and making this care a reasonable venture for physicians.

How’d You Do? – National Consumers League

/in /by

Yesterday, we shared four sample LifeSmarts question to test your ‘smarts. How’d you do?

  • Foods that bear the radura logo have been: c. Treated by irradiation
  • You are a 16-year-old employee. Which of the following are you not allowed to do under the federal child labor laws: c. Be a delivery driver
  • Which of the following calls would be prohibited when you register for the National Do Not Call list? c. Telemarketing calls
  • What kind of personal information is not covered by any federal privacy law? c. What you watch on cable television
  • Which of the following is not an advantage of using compact fluorescent light bulbs instead of incandescent light bulbs? c. They cost less

How We Spent Our Summer Vacation – National Consumers League

/in /by

The back-to-school sales prove it: Summer is coming to an end. During these warm days, NCL staff has been busy preparing for the 2008-2009 LifeSmarts program year, which will officially go live in just a few weeks. To get your juices flowing, see if you can handle a couple LifeSmarts practice questions. (We’ll post the answers tomorrow.)

Foods that bear the radura logo have been:

a. Organically grown
b. Treated with pesticides
c. Treated by irradiation

You are a 16-year-old employee. Which of the following are you not allowed to do under the federal child labor laws:

a. Work as a hired farmworker
b. Cook on a grill in a restaurant
c. Be a delivery driver

Which of the following calls would be prohibited when you register for the National Do Not Call list?

a. Political calls
b. Surveys
c. Telemarketing calls

What kind of personal information is not covered by any federal privacy law?

a. Titles of videos you rent
b. Items you buy at a supermarket
c. What you watch on cable television

Which of the following calls would be prohibited when you register for the National Do Not Call list?

a. Political calls
b. Surveys
c. Telemarketing calls

Which of the following is not an advantage of using compact fluorescent light bulbs instead of incandescent light bulbs?

a.  They last longer
b.  They use less energy
c.  They cost less

Stop! for Brake Safety Awareness – National Consumers League

/in /by

Everybody’s talking about gas and fuel efficiency these days, but this month we’re celebrating Brake Safety Awareness. Keeping your car in good shape can prevent crashes and protect your investment, and brakes are one of the most important systems in a vehicle. This month in NCL’s Consumer Calendar, we’re helping consumers learn the importance of a safe brake system and urging them to pull into an auto repair shop to get their brake

s checked during Brake Safety Awareness Week, which is coming up: Aug 24-30.

During Brake Safety Awareness Week, an initiative of the Motorist Assurance Program (MAP) and the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (CVSA), all MAP Participating Service Facilities will check your car’s brakes for free by technicians that are MAP qualified or ASE certified.

Unemployed = Unemployment Benefits, Right? – National Consumers League

/in /by

by Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

Not necessarily. I always assumed that when you worked, then lost your job, you’re automatically entitled to unemployment benefits—they are part of our American “safety net.” Turns out I was wrong: according to a recent story in the Wall Street Journal, July 29, only 37% of the country’s unemployed received benefits in 2007, down from 55% in 1958 and 44% in 2001. The Journal based its numbers on Labor Department statistics.

The workers who don’t qualify for unemployment include part timers, people who quit or were fired, and those who didn’t earn enough money in a one-year “base period” that often excludes the most recent 3-6 months. Most states’ base period includes the first four of the last five completed quarters. States often require an average weekly wage in calculating their base period.

Covering a mere 37% of the unemployed is unconscionable. Unemployment benefits are often the only life jacket that workers can grab onto to keep food on the table and the lights on. Low income workers bear the brunt of this policy, with fewer than 15% of low wage workers getting benefits, according to the Government Accountability Office.

The House of Representatives passed a bill last year to provide an additional $7 billion to allow part-time workers to receive benefits and count earnings more generously. The Senate is supposed to take up a similar bill this fall. Our friends at NELP (National Employment Law Project) are working to get the bill passed and they argue that 300,000 additional workers would qualify for benefits if states changed the way they determine the base earnings period. An employer-based group in Texas was quoted as saying the bill isn’t a “panacea for everyone who happens not to be working.” No, but laid off workers aren’t looking for a panacea. They’re looking for a little help to feed their families. At an annual cost of $550 million, we ought to be able to make that happen.

If You’re Cheated Out of Wages, You May Be On Your Own – National Consumers League

/in /by

by Reid Maki, NCL Director of Social Responsibility and Fair Labor Standards

Have you or a friend ever been cheated out of your pay? The most common wage violations in America involve employers who refuse to pay the minimum wage or refuse to pay the overtime wages that workers earn. Often, these violations affect the working poor—the very people who can least afford to lose the wages.

The Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor is supposed to protect American workers who don’t receive their proper pay, but the agency is not doing enough, according to testimony at a House of Representatives Education and Labor Committee hearing I attended on July 15th.

“As a nation, we face a crisis of wage theft,” testified Kim Bobo, the executive director of Interfaith Worker Justice, a national network of 60 local affiliates that engage the religious community in efforts to help workers, especially low-wage workers. According to Bobo, two million U.S. workers aren’t paid the minimum wage, three million are misclassified as independent contractors instead of employees, and millions more are illegally denied overtime pay. “The Wage and Hour division is failing to protect workers from wage theft because of its woefully inadequate enforcement of the federal wage and hour laws,” she complained.

One of the primary reasons for this lack of enforcement: Wage and Hour is grossly understaffed. Less than 750 investigators are available to go out into the field and look into workers’ complaints about being cheated. That translates to one investigator for every 10,000 businesses. Bobo noted that if the ratio of investigators to businesses that existed in 1941 held today, we would have 34,000 investigators.

Two officials from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) testified about Wage and Hour’s performance. Ann-Marie Lasowski, acting director of education, workforce and income security issues, testified that from fiscal year 1997 to 2007, the number of Wage and Hour enforcement actions decreased by more than a third, from approximately 47,000 in 1997 to just under 30,000 in 2007. Lasowski said that Wage and Hour did not allocate resources well. She said the division commissioned studies to help it identify industries where abuses were likely to occur—mostly in low-wage industries —but then failed to allocate extra resources to enforce violations in those industries.

Greg Kutz, GAO’s managing director of forensic audits and special investigations, told the House panel that when researchers looked at 15 Wage and Hour investigations they found frighteningly inadequate performance. Some complaints by workers were rejected simply because employers failed to provide accurate information. In some cases, Wage and Hour investigators could not locate employers even though GAO researchers found the same employers easily. In another case, Wage and Hour closed a complaint because the employer refused to pay back the lost wages that the investigator determined they owed the worker. In another instance, Wage and Hour delayed investigating a case for a year and then told the worker that they were dropping the complaint because the statute of limitations for assessing back wages was close to expiring.

Acting Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division Alexander Passantino denied GAO’s claims and attacked the GAO’s research methodology. Passantino noted that in fiscal year 2007, Wage and Hour collected $220 million in back wages, the highest total ever collected, despite a drop of over 220 investigators—23 percent—over the last seven years.

Democrats on the committee, including Chairman George Miller of California, did not accept his defense of the Department of Labor, suggesting that DOL was failing the American worker. “Although the Department of Labor has the necessary tools to fight wage theft, the GAO investigation suggests that the problem of wage theft is only getting worse because of weaker enforcement,” said Miller.

The National Consumers League is concerned about any system that asks a single federal investigator to enforce labor violations in over 10,000 work places. That’s just asking for failure. We hope the next president will take a step toward correcting this problem by pledging to double the number of investigators in his first term—that’s still not enough to solve the problem, but it’s a start. In the meantime, DOL should take a hard look at the GAO’s recommendations to see if Wage and Hour can do a better job of allocating resources to protect American’s most vulnerable workers.

Historic Consumer Product Bill a Boon for Kids’ Safety – National Consumers League

/in /by

by Sally Greenberg

In my years working as product safety counsel for Consumers Union, I spent a lot of time trying to improve product safety for consumers, especially kids. This week both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate supported truly historic reforms – reforms that seemed like mere pipe dreams only a few years ago. The bill, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008, awaits the President’s signature.

One thing I have learned over the years, as well, is that a product safety crisis – like the one in 2000 when we learned that thousands of Firestone Tires were defective and separated off of (mostly) Ford Explorer at high speeds, killing hundreds of drivers and passengers – or the presence of excessive levels of lead in the toys our children are playing with – is a wakeup call for legislators and consumers alike. These crises can open the door to more close look at the laws that affect safety and ways to improve them.

To the credit of my fellow consumer advocates and members of congress from both parties, they rolled up their sleeves and worked together for reforms. The catalyzing event was high lead levels in toys discovered over the past two years – that opened the door to scrutiny of the federal agency charged with keeping our products safe, the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Traditionally underfunded and under the radar screen, the CPSC was operating with half the employees it began with in the mid-1970s while the number of consumer products had increased exponentially. Worthy of note, as well, were the comments by the top guy at the Toy Industry of America, who said the bill was “the right thing to do.”

Among the bill’s provisions, it will:

  • Effectively ban lead from children’s toys, a position NCL has long endorsed. Lead is a proven toxin for children’s development and can do lifelong damage. No object intended for use by children should contain anything but the most minute amounts of lead.
  • Require toymakers to have independent labs to test products before they are sold; many consumers assumed this was happening already, but instead, too many toys and products intended for children were introduced into the marketplace without proper testing and analysis Consumers may eventually see labels certifying toys have been tested before being sold, and consumers buying online or through a catalog will be able to see the same warning label that appears on packaging to warn parents of small parts or other potential hazards.
  • Allow the CPSC to post information about products that have consumers have reported to the agency as being dangerous or defective; other federal agencies allow consumers to go to their websites to check on products before they purchase them. A provision of CPSC’s law prevented it from posting this information until the agency checked in with the manufacturer. That will change under the new law.
  • State attorneys general will have the authority to help enforce federal product safety laws and take manufacturers to court to keep dangerous products off the market.
  • This beleaguered agency will finally get the funding it needs to carry out its many and growing responsibilities. The CPSC budget will nearly double to $136 million, from $80 million for this fiscal year; the agency has already hired additional inspectors for the nation’s largest ports, where dangerous imports can enter the country currently unnoticed because of weak enforcement.

Finally, while at Consumers Union I had the honor of working with Linda Ginzel and Boaz Keysar after their toddler son died in a recalled and defective portable crib that killed other children as well. They have been heroic in their fight for safer kids’ products and better regulations to protect them. I am so happy that after many years of working to get these reforms into the Consumer Product Safety Act, there will finally be a requirement for mandatory standards and testing for specific infant and toddler products, we will see a ban on the sale, lease or use in commercial settings of cribs that do not meet current safety standards, and product registration cards will be required with new products to facilitate notice of recalled products.

The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 includes many of the proposals consumer groups have worked to get enacted for a decade. It took a wake-up call like high levels of lead in toys to get Congress’ attention to the sad state of product safety regulation – and hats off to the members and their staffs in both parties for their support – but with the enactment of this bill we will see a far better safety environment, and most important, vastly safer toys and products for the most precious and vulnerable consumers, our kids.

Tomatoes, Salmonella, and Traceability – National Consumers League

/in /by

by Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

I love tomatoes. Home grown, store bought, on the vine, off the vine, grape and cherry tomatoes, doesn’t matter, I love them all. But over the past few months, as the Food and Drug Administration suspected tomatoes as the source of a salmonella outbreak that sickened 1,300 consumers in the United States and Canada, I’ve begun to worry that tomatoes could go the way of the Edsel. The industry has lost an estimated $250 million, with the fruit rotting on the vine. (Yes, tomatoes are a fruit!) You have to feel terrible for tomato producers as the FDA has struggled to pin down the source of the foodborne pathogen.

Tracing what fruit or vegetable is the source of an outbreak like salmonella, even with advances in technology, is still dependent on local health officials and a poor or nonexistent trace-back system. Some local health departments are better than others. In the case of tomatoes, in mid-May the FDA announced a Salmonella outbreak and focused on tomatoes alone, but it wasn’t until July 9 that FDA’s warnings were expanded to include jalapeños. A bioterrorism law passed in 2002 was supposed to set up systems to enable tracing back through the food supply to find the source of microbes like Salmonella. In this recent outbreak, however, investigators were rifling through paper invoices instead of computer records. The system is so laborious that many times investigators don’t learn what made people sick, or by the time they do, the outbreak is over. Meanwhile, when tomatoes or peppers or other foods are implicated, consumers steer clear, restaurants steer clear, and the growers and everyone in the chain of production lose millions.

Trace-back systems with identifying information on each piece of produce would help solve this problem. I’ve seen infrared technologies designed to do just that. The FDA says that three key components are needed for trace back systems to work: a unique identifier that follows each food item from field to consumer, electronic record keeping and a common framework for sharing information among all the players.

Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich) is working on legislation that would incorporate a tracing system, and he hopes to bring it to a floor vote this year. Dingell’s House Energy and Commerce Committee is holding a hearing today on the salmonella investigation.

And though the produce industry has resisted trace back systems because of the expense and fear that their products might receive negative attention, a quarter of a billion dollars in losses might make produce growers more receptive to change that will save them money in the long run.

Another move in the right direction is the federal law—supported by the National Consumers League—that becomes effective later this year requiring a country-of-origin label for all food, even if it’s U.S.-grown. Those labels provide an opportunity to add extra information, such as a unique tracking number. State and local heath departments need to coordinate their food safety efforts, while the federal government adds to the mix a far more accurate traceability system. This will not only protect consumers but it will protect the industries that produce the vegetables and fruits we love, like tomatoes.

Go Green (and $ave too!) – National Consumers League

/in /by

These days, global warming sure is the kind of hot topic (sorry) that gets a lot of people anxious. Many consumers may not be aware, however, that by taking a few simple steps to be a good global citizen and help protect the planet, they can actually save some money in the process.

This month, the National Consumers League is helping consumers adopt environmentally-friendly practices that are also friendly to their wallets in NCL‘s “2008 Consumer Calendar: Do We Have Tips for You!”

Tips for going/saving green:

  • Tune up. Keep your call well-tuned and your tires properly inflated to get better gas mileage and cut pollution.
  • Switch to energy-saving compact fluorescent light bulbs, which last longer.
  • Turn off the TV and other appliances when you’re not using them. Use appliances’ — like computers’ — energy-saving modes.

In Washington, Advocates and Federal Officials Meet to Address Child Labor Issues – National Consumers League

/in /by

By Paula Osborn, NCL Public Policy Intern

Around the world, more than 200 million children toil in abusive child labor. Last week, members of the Child Labor Coalition (CLC), which is coordinated by the National Consumers League, met to discuss the progress being made to ameliorate the problem.

Kailash Satyarthi, the Chair for the Global March against Child Labor and the President of the Global Campaign for Education, who, at great danger to himself, rescues bonded child laborers in India, and Ambassador-at-Large Mark Lagon who is the Director of the Trafficking in Persons Office for the U.S. State Department were the main speakers. A diverse group of CLC members and interested individuals attended, including representatives from the International Labor Organization (ILO), the National Education Association (NEA), Rugmark, the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs (AFOP), and a dozen or so organizations. Federal officials from the State Department and the Department of Labor also attended.

Satyarthi, who has twice been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, told the CLC that the elimination of child labor cannot occur without universal education, which he called a “fundamental human right.” Although we are making progress, there is still a long way to go, said Satyarthi.

Ambassador Lagon discussed at length the U.S. Department of State’s annual Trafficking in Persons Report; a country by country review of human trafficking problems around the world, which was released in June. Lagon said that children are particularly vulnerable to human trafficking, especially those who are out of school. He also spoke about the need to re-assimilate children rescued from enslaved labor. The ambassador discussed several child labor and child slavery hot spots, including: the Congo, where young children are forced to become soldiers; and the Ivory Coast, where children are trafficked to harvest cocoa beans used in making chocolate.

Lagon and Satyarthi stressed the important role consumers have in combating child labor, urging consumers to research companies and their labor practices to ensure that their products are child labor free.

Satyarthi spoke movingly of witnessing children sewing soccer balls who worked so hard they cut their fingers as they sowed. They would continue working, he said, motivated by the dream that they—one day—may be able to play with the balls they toiled to make but could not afford to buy.

Consumers need to ask themselves if they are unwittingly contributing to the destruction of young lives. Next time you buy a soccer ball, you may want to ask yourself: “Did the blood of a child go into the making of this product?”