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Category Archives: regulation
Health Insurance and Regulation
Faith-based organizations that share the costs of health care among their members are a tiny part of the health care coverage industry. They’re also not regulated by government.
[Faith-based] ministry officials say they aren’t offering insurance, don’t guarantee claims will be paid, and don’t need to be regulated.
Naturally, regulators object.
But now, some insurance commissioners are concerned that the ministries could put consumers at risk if bills aren’t paid.
This is the consumer’s choice to risk, though, not government’s authority to command not to. At least in a free society.
And more tellingly:
State regulators also say health ministries disrupt the insurance market because they tend to attract healthier consumers, siphoning them from commercial plans that can be left with sicker or older customers.
What these government regulators carefully omit to mention, though, is that the only “market” liable to disruption is their precious regulated “market.” In a free market economy, such competition is healthy, if disruptive, leading as it does to improving products and lowering costs.
Unfortunately, the number of faith-based health cost sharing entities that are exempt from Obamacare is carefully and deliberately circumscribed by Obamacare. That needs to change.
Personal Secrecy vs National Security
The latest batch of 3,105 emails includes 275 documents upgraded to “classified” since they landed in the former Secretary’s personal inbox. That brings the total number of classified docs found in the emails to 1,274. A State Department official told Fox News on Thursday that two of those emails were upgraded to “secret,” while most of the others were upgraded to “confidential.”
Because Democratic Party Presidential candidate and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s desire to keep her doings in our name as a Cabinet Secretary were more important than our national security.
We don’t need four more years of this from within the White House.
Maybe It’s Time
I’ve written before about the…suboptimality…of the SEC using its own “court” system (in quotes because it’s more of a kangaroo court system, with the SEC serving as accuser, prosecutor, judge (no jury), punisher, and appellate “court”). The SEC has even pretended to be changing its ways.
Now, this.
After five years, four judges, three rulings, two appeals and the loss of their careers, John Flannery and James Hopkins this month won their legal battle against the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The former State Street Corp executives’ long legal fight took place almost entirely in the SEC’s in-house court system, which agency officials have lauded as offering a fast-track alternative to federal court.
Their problem is all too typical of this SEC.
Since Mary Jo White became SEC chairman in April 2013, the median time for the agency to decide appeals of its in-house judges’ decisions has increased to 19 months….
Then there’s the excuse.
A key part of the agency’s argument has been that the internal tribunal is more efficient.
You bet it is. The conviction and upholding rate is through the roof compared with the rates from those cases that make it out of the SEC and into an actual Federal court.
Since the bureaucrats at the SEC place their own imperatives ahead of their job, maybe it’s time to disband the SEC and replace it with a securities industry overseer that will place its job ahead of the imperatives of the new, fresh personnel who will populate it.
Alternatively, maybe it’d be sufficient to replace the head bureaucrat with someone who understands for whom she works.
Maybe It’s Time
Banks fear a growing number of employees are unwittingly exposing valuable information to hackers or in some cases leaving digital clues that make a breach possible.
And
Several banks are also increasingly testing whether their employees unintentionally leave them susceptible to hackers by falling prey to “spear-phishing” attempts, in which criminals lure recipients to click on links.
And
Weeks after JP Morgan Chase & Co was hit with a massive data breach that exposed information from 76 million households, the country’s biggest bank by assets sent a fake phishing email as a test to its more than 250,000 employees. Roughly 20% of them clicked on it, according to people familiar with the email.
There’s no excuse for employees, in this day and age, being so gullible or so careless.
If employees are going to continue to be willfully irresponsible, maybe it’s time for employers to get hard-nosed in the workplace: company equipment is for company business exclusively, including during lunch or other breaks. With firing being the default sanction for misuse.
Full stop.