Last week, while states like Florida and South Carolina were stating their intentions to opt out of the portion of the Affordable Care Act that expands Medicaid coverage to millions of Americans, Texas — where approximately 2 million currently uninsured residents would have been eligible for coverage. remained oddly quiet on the matter. That is, until Governor Rick Perry declared his intention this morning. [More]
texas
Lawsuit: I Listened To Chase About My Mortgage And Ended Up With No House And A Dead Husband
By 7.6.12
A Texas widow and her family have filed a lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase and others, alleging that their efforts to refinance their mortgage with the bank only resulted in foreclosure, heartache and her husband’s fatal heart attack. [More]
T-Mobile Doesn’t Really Care That Your House Burnt Down
By 7.2.12
T-Mobile is lagging behind the rest of its competition. It’s a distant #4 in the U.S. wireless market and even the third-place contender, Sprint, has a pretty robust prepaid customer base. So T-Mobile should be doing everything it can to retain customers; this apparently includes not waiving early termination fees for customers who have to move because their house burns down. [More]
Florida, Other States Opting Out Of Medicaid Expansion Four Years Before They Are Expected To Pay A Dime
By 7.2.12
Even though the expansion of Medicaid to cover several million more low-income Americans isn’t slated to begin until January 2014 — and even though states aren’t scheduled to begin contributing anything to the expansion until 2016 — some states have already declared their intention to not take part in the program. [More]
Church Buys Foreclosed Property, Ends Up With $170,000 Tax Bill
By 6.18.12
Members of a Dallas-area church congregation thought they had done their due diligence when they looked into buying some foreclosed property. They were told that all the back taxes had been cleared off the books; so why are they now facing a tax bill for $170,000? [More]
Woman Hires Family To Liven Up For-Sale Home, Now She Can’t Enter Her Own Property
By 6.6.12
With so many abandoned and vacant homes on the market, some sellers are hiring companies to place families in their properties in the hopes that doing so will make the house feel less empty and more appealing to buyers. But one woman in Texas says she’s been bitten on the butt by her decision to use a so-called “staging” family. [More]
Petco Loses Dogs Too
By 5.18.12
It’s not just airlines that fail at keeping a handle on customers’ pets. Just ask the Texas man who took his retriever in to his local Petco for some grooming and is now looking for help trying to find the lost pooch. [More]
Mall Now Requires Teens Shop With Parents After 6:00 P.M.
By 5.10.12
For teens at the NorthPark Center mall in Dallas, there’s no more whiling away the hours loitering at the food court with their school chums. If kids under the age of 18 want to hang at the mall after 6:00 p.m., they now have to do it with parents in tow. [More]
Atheist Group: Movie Theater Discriminated Against Us By Pulling Ad
By 4.30.12
An atheist group in Texas is claiming discrimination after a local movie theater backed out of an agreement to run ads for the organization during pre-movie slideshows. [More]
Amazon To Start Collecting Sales Tax In Texas
By 4.28.12
Starting in July, shoppers in Texas will no longer have to go through the hassle of calculating and paying all that sales tax that Amazon hasn’t been collecting on their purchases. On Friday, the Lone Star State joined a growing group of states reaching accords with the online giant about making sure those taxes get collected at the time of purchase. [More]
Average Foreclosure In NYC Area Now Takes Longer Than 3 Years
By 4.27.12
Aside from being the title of a totally rad Olsen Twins movie, the phrase “New York minute” implies that things move rapidly in the Big Apple. One exception is the home foreclosure process, which can drag out to more than 1,100 days in the NYC metro area. [More]
$1.00/Gallon Gas Causes Rush On Texas Filling Station
By 4.10.12
When an online retailer makes a pricing error, it usually has a chance to cancel orders before they ship. But when a gas station accidentally sells fuel for nearly 75% off the retail price, oodles of drivers will line up to fill up before someone fixes the mistake. [More]
City May Issue Fines If Your Dog Barks For Longer Than 10 Minutes
By 1.24.12
Barking dogs can be an annoyance. Ask anyone who has ever lived next to a chatty canine. But at what point does that annoyance cross the line and become a nuisance worthy of being issued a fine. For the folks in Fort Worth, TX, that threshold is ten minutes. [More]
Plumber Says It's God's Will That His Customers Only Pay What They Can
By 12.14.11
A plumber in Texas has a very full appointment book these days. That’s because he doesn’t invoice his customers for the sometimes costly work he performs. Instead, he only asks them to pay what they can afford. [More]
Bank Of America Tries To Foreclose On Home Destroyed By 2008 Hurricane
By 11.1.11
Imagine that you’re working overseas when your home is destroyed by a hurricane. Sucks, right? But you keep paying the mortgage on the property because you hope to eventually rebuild. So why is Bank of America foreclosing? [More]
Passenger Sues Continental, Others Over Turbulent Flight
By 10.11.11
When what was supposed to be a 20-minute flight turns into two-plus hours of turbulence, it’s easy to understand why a passenger would be peeved. But is worthy of a lawsuit against four airlines? [More]
Blind Woman Says Her House Was Stolen And Bulldozed
By 9.19.11
A 77-year old blind Texas woman says she thought she was signing a document to get relief from taxes, but instead she was tricked into signing over the deed to her house. [More]
Shoplifter Sentenced To Life In Prison After Walmart Worker Dies
By 9.16.11
Last June, while attempting to heist a $348 TV from a Texas Walmart, a shoplifter knocked over a Walmart staffer, sending him to the hospital where he would die nine days later. Now that shoplifter has been sentenced to life in prison, even though he was never charged with the worker’s death and the medical examiner determined the actual cause of death was end-stage liver cirrhosis. [More]
