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November 2009 Newsletter |
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 | The Public vs. Toxic Chemicals in Consumer Products
By BECKI KAMMERLING, ESQ. |
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There are an estimated 80,000 chemicals used in products on the market today. The EPA regulates only 5 of those chemicals through the Toxics Substance Control Act of 1976 (15 U.S.C. §2601 et seq.). How safe are the rest of those 79,095 chemicals? Could they be to blame for rising cancer rates, birth defects, and learning disabilities?
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| Do Medical Malpractice Lawsuits Drive Up the Cost of Medical Care?
By NANCY GARDNER, ESQ. |
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Medical malpractice tort reform is repeatedly cited as an immediate and necessary means of bringing down skyrocketing health care costs in this country. We hear over and over again that doctors are closing their practices, hospital emergency rooms are shutting down, pregnant women cannot find physicians to deliver their babies and exorbitant malpractice insurance premiums are being passed on to the consumer in the form of higher medical bills. Doctors are forced to practice defensive medicine in order to reduce the chances of getting sued. The cost of health care can be reduced by 10 to 15% by reforming the system to prevent greedy lawyers and misguided patients from filing "frivolous" lawsuits that result in runaway jury verdicts and outrageous settlements in cases where doctors have done nothing wrong. Assertions such as these are repeated so frequently in the political forum and make such logical, intuitive sense, that they are widely accepted as true by the general public. But does the objective evidence support the conclusion that medical malpractice lawsuits force up the cost of medical care?
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| The Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009 Reigns in Unfair and Deceptive Practices of Credit Card Lenders
By ROXANNA TABATABAEEPOUR, ESQ. |
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On May 22, 2009, in an attempt to mitigate the devastating consequences that unfair and deceptive credit card practices have had on the U.S. credit market, President Obama signed into law The Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009 ("The CARD Act of 2009"), P.L. 111-24. The CARD Act was first introduced by Connecticut Senator Dodd, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, to increase the transparency of lending, improve lending practices generally, protect under age consumers from predatory practices, and further encourage borrowers to manage credit responsibly. The CARD Act, which takes full effect in February 2010, attempts to supplement and strengthen existing legislation and address traditionally unregulated areas of the credit market, to eliminate the mass marketing strategy that lenders have utilized in the past. The CARD Act arose from the concerns expressed by the GAO (Government Accountability Office), the OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) and other regulatory agencies that were not fully addressed by the December 2008 revisions to Regulation Z and Regulation AA, including, unilateral increases in interest rates, imposition of additional transaction fees, inconspicuous disclosures, and the issuance of credit to young people.
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