Kids grow. This may not come as a surprise to most of us, who were ourselves children one, but health insurance companies are not necessarily prepared for this facet of reality. And where reality and bureaucracy can really come into hard conflict is when kids who need durable medical equipment might — gasp — outgrow the tech, which doesn’t grow at all. [More]
disability
10 Things We Learned About The Structured Settlement Purchase Industry
By 8.28.15
Report after report finds that payday lenders, auto title loan firms and pension advance operations unfairly target vulnerable consumers with high fees and questionable terms, but a new investigative piece from The Washington Post shows that are some lesser-known, but very lucrative players offering quick cash to vulnerable consumers: structured settlement purchasing companies. [More]
Another Ignorant Restaurant Employee Assumes That Only Blind People Have Service Dogs
By 2.21.14
How many times do we have to go over this? When someone enters a business with a dog and says, “This is my service dog,” the correct answer is not “You aren’t blind!” Yet a Texas Marine veteran says that he was asked to leave a restaurant because he brought his service dog in training into the establishment. [More]
Get My Daughter A Full-Time Job And I’ll Give You 500 Bucks
By 3.5.13
Sorry, that’s not a direct offer from Consumerist: we don’t have daughters, or $500. A 36-year-old Southern California woman who has spent the last decade and a half as her mother’s caregiver after a car crash is looking for a job now that her mother is well enough to live alone. Her mother has put up a $500 reward to anyone who is able to get her a job. [More]
How Consumerist Empowered A Consumer, Saved The Day
By 9.10.12
Lenora isn’t a regular reader of this site, but somehow stumbled across it while trying to sort out a problem with Time Warner Cable. Her service had been shut off after she and her husband spent five months with no income. We were able to help her by providing an executive customer service contact at the company where she could send an e-mail, then call the president’s office directly. She made her case and provided proof to someone with power, and her service was back on later that day. [More]
Social Security Disability Payments Could Dry Up In 2017
By 8.22.11
The Social Security disability fund may not be able to make payments come 2017, according to a new analysis by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). [More]
AT&T Thinks You Should Pay Their Disability Claims
By 3.4.10
Not only does AT&T give you service you can’t use and then continue to bill for it, they also apparently want you to pay the disability claim when one of their employees injures himself on your property. [More]
Four Financial Tools All New Parents Need
By 6.27.09
The baby’s on the way! You’ve got a crib, toys, and a rapidly approaching delivery date. So what else you do need? Kiplinger shares the four must-have financial tools that no new parent should go without…
Lawsuits Claim Insurers Are Choking Social Security With Unnecessary Disability Applications
By 4.3.08
Two whistleblower lawsuits have been filed recently against insurers, faulting them for requiring unnecessary and repeated disability applications with Social Security before they’ll pay out any benefits. One person says her disability insurer, the Unum Group—which was only paying her $50 a month for a temporary injury she was almost certain to recover from—called her 10 times to ask her about her Social Security disability application. The woman told the New York Times “she did not need or want money from Social Security, and did not think she was entitled to it. Her doctors had told her she would recover, and Social Security is limited to people whose disabilities are total and permanent.”
Payday Lenders Convince Elderly To Assign Social Security Checks To Them, Hand Back Allowances
By 2.22.08
This writer is quickly growing convinced that payday lenders are the modern version of indentured servitude, trapping consumers in cycles of debt that simply cannot be broken in their lifetimes.
