Category Archives: Uncategorized
California Regulators Are Urged To Scrutinize Health Insurance Mega-Mergers
by Chad Terhune, Los Angeles Times
There’s a lot at stake for families and employers if the deals go through and leave three health insurers in control of nearly half of the U.S. commercial insurance market. … Much of the debate centers on whether insurers should be required to limit rate increases for a time, expand their provider networks and make other pledges to improve patient care in order to win regulatory approval at the state level. … Consumer advocates say they fear that existing problems over affordability and access to care will get worse as insurers consolidate market power. Read More ›
In Reversal, Some Drivers Ditching Uber And Lyft For Cabs
by Jon Brooks, KQED
[One taxi driver] drove on the side for both Uber and Lyft for about a year, but stopped around seven or eight months ago. The main reason: the extra cost and “wear and tear” of using his own car to do business. … Customers became angry at the inflated fares they had to pay during a surge pricing period and slammed [the driver’s] car door so hard he had to have his automatic windows repaired. But hadn’t those customers agreed to accept the surge price when they ordered the ride? “[Passengers] are still mad, even though they know in advance,” he said. Read More ›
Google Is Tracking Students As It Sells More Products To Schools, Privacy Advocates Warn
by Andrea Peterson, Washington Post
In 2014, 28 student data privacy laws were signed into law across 20 states. … One of the toughest was a California law that bars school vendors from selling student data, using it to target advertisements, or building a profile about them for non-educational purposes. … The Roseville City School District in California [where one concerned parent has struggled to keep his 4th grade daughter out of Google’s data] said the school system is evaluating how the state law will impact their district and its vendors. Read More ›
PUC Needs A Clean Break With Peevey Era
by The Editorial Board, San Diego Union-Tribune
If PUC President Michael Picker wants to save his agency from a further erosion of its tattered reputation … [he] should demand that the PUC stop withholding documents from the media and stop resisting cooperation with criminal investigators. … Then the PUC president should announce he no longer supports the PUC’s November 2014 vote to assign 70 percent of the cost of the San Onofre shutdown — $3.3 billion — to the utilities’ ratepayers. The deal is an awful one for the utilities’ millions of customers. Read More ›
Customers Of Clean Energy Programs Hit With Fee Increase
by Lizzie Johnson, San Francisco Chronicle
Hundreds of protesters came from as far as San Diego to oppose the fee increase at Thursday’s meeting in San Francisco. They carried homemade signs reading “Stand Up to Natural Gas!” and “CPUC: Consumers Pay Again?!” Public comment on the change stretched for more than two hours. … PG&E originally filed an application to raise the fee by 70 percent in June, but submitted another request last month to as much as double it. The fee helps the power company pay for energy it contracted for when it had more customers, preventing remaining patrons from bearing the brunt of the costs. The charge is required by law and determined by a formula implemented by the CPUC in 2011. Read More ›
Is Your Thanksgiving Turkey On Drugs?
by Chris Morran, Consumerist
Only two of the large turkey companies — Tyson (Hillshire Farm), and Hain Pure Protein (Plainville Farms brand) — avoid the use of all antibiotics and ractopamine. All of the others at least use antibiotics for disease prevention, though biggies like Cargill and Foster Farms claim to not use the drugs for growth-promotion. … Foster Farms — the poultry giant behind a massive outbreak of salmonella in 2013 — announced this past summer that it will eventually eliminate all medically important antibiotics from its birds, but was criticized for not providing a more specific timeline to reach that goal. Read More ›
Paris Attacks Spark Another Fight Against Encryption
by Sean Sposito, San Francisco Chronicle
[Encryption “back-doors” for law enforcement] won’t necessarily weaken terrorist organizations’ ability to communicate with each other over the Internet. … But what it could do is make it easier for criminals and terrorists to access our financial, medical and other personal records, said Pam Dixon, the executive director of the World Privacy Forum in San Diego. They might find a way through the back-door as well. “Strong crypto means good security for all of us,” she said. “It means that banks and hospitals can secure financial and other transactions in our digital world.” Read More ›
Nonprofit Blue Shield Accused Of Backing Out Of $140-Million Charity Pledge
by Chad Terhune, Los Angeles Times
Blue Shield’s corporate conduct has come under intense scrutiny for the past year after officials revoked its longtime state tax exemption. Auditors at the California Franchise Tax Board criticized the insurer for stockpiling “extraordinarily high surpluses” of $4 billion and for failing to offer more affordable coverage as a nonprofit. California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones is also investigating Blue Shield’s disclosures on executive compensation. Read More ›
85,000 Additional Corinthian Students To Get Fast-Track Debt Relief
by Chris Kirkham, Los Angeles Times
There was enough evidence to conclude that Everest’s California and online campuses, along with California WyoTech schools, had deceived students by overstating job placement numbers. … [The California Attorney General’s Office] alleged in a lawsuit filed in 2013 that Corinthian had overstated job placement rates by counting graduates who were employed at temporary staffing agencies or one-day health fairs. In some cases, according to the complaint, Corinthian had paid staffing agencies to hire students in order to satisfy accrediting entities. Read More ›
One Dead And Three Injured In PG&E Natural Gas Line Explosion Southwest Of Bakersfield
by Steven Mayer, J.W. Burch IV, James Burger and John Cox, The Bakersfield Californian
“Unfortunately the vehicle and house (near the blast) were all but gone and a hay barn also was burning,” [an eyewitness] said in a text. “I don’t see how anyone still in the house could’ve survived once the flames got there.” The push of gas and flames threw trees into the air, she said. … [PG&E] said automatic valves initiated a shutoff, but that assertion was contradicted by local fire officials. Read More ›
New California Data On Ride Services Reveal Rise In Collisions And Incidents
by Bryan Goebel, The California Report
“If it’s normalized by miles driven, you’d expect the number of incidents to be somewhat stable over time,” [UCLA transportation expert Juan Matute told the CPUC]. “That would be indicative of TNCs being less safe as they scale up.” … In 2013, an Uber driver was charged with vehicular manslaughter for hitting and killing 6-year-old Sofia Liu as she and her family were walking in a crosswalk. … [Uber] was threatened in July with suspension and a $7 million fine by an administrative law judge for failing to meet all the [CPUC] reporting requirements. Read More ›
This Smart TV Takes Tracking To A New Level
by Andrea Peterson, The Washington Post
Vizio, a top television maker, automatically tracks the viewing habits of Smart TV owners and shares that information with advertisers in a way that could connect those preferences to what those customers do on their phones or other mobile devices. … There are laws that limit how companies share information about video watching habits, including the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA). However, Vizio says that those laws do not apply to its tracking service because the company associates IP addresses with the data rather than a person’s name or other “personally identifiable information.” Read More ›
CFC Saved Drivers Over $15 Million On Insurance In 2015
Hartford and Safeco had both sought to boost auto insurance rates by almost 7%, but CFC challenged the rate hike proposals. The result: $5 million in auto policy savings for Hartford customers and $10 million for Safeco customers. In August, GEICO agreed to pay $6 million to settle CFC’s complaint alleging the insurance giant violated civil rights and insurance law by targeting women and unmarried, lower-income motorists with deceptive and inflated automobile insurance rate quotes. It is difficult to calculate motorists’ potential savings resulting from the settlement, but CFC estimates it may reach several million dollars annually. Read More ›