March 10, 2005
Bankruptcy and Compassionate Conservatism
So, Republicans want to make it harder for people to declare personal bankruptcy. Hmmm. Well, we know who the winners will be – credit card companies and banks. The losers? The usual suspects – the working poor.
Harvard University released a study earlier this year revealing that approximately half of all personal bankruptcies in the U.S. are driven by illness and medical bills. And it turns out that three-quarters of these folks actually had health insurance.
So basically, Average Joe American is be-bopping along, probably living paycheck-to-paycheck as it is, then BAM! He is faced with a health-related catastrophe. If he is lucky enough to survive said catastrophe, he’s left with the prize of insurmountable medical bills. Perhaps he has put some of this debt on his credit cards until he soon realizes the magnitude of his debt. Knowing that he can never pay back such a huge debt and still pay his regular monthly bills, he opts to file for bankruptcy.
But that just doesn’t sit well with the credit card companies. And Republican lawmakers hear the poor cries of these downtrodden credit card companies and go champion their cause for them by pushing through legislation that would make it more difficult for our friend Joe to relieve his debt.
It would never occur to them to instead look at why people get into financial trouble in the first place. To examine why people with health insurance STILL incur massive medical debts. To focus on why so many Americans work two and three jobs and STILL can’t make ends meet. These Republicans, by and large, aren’t folks who ask “why” a lot. No, these are folks who throw around phrases like “personal responsibility” and “ownership society.”
I believe in personal responsibility, too. I believe that if you incur credit card debt, as I did in a big way during a bout with immaturity in my 20’s, you pay it back. I’m doing that, slowly but surely. But I also, thank goodness and knock on wood, have not been faced with a major health crisis. I haven’t had my utilities disconnected because I can’t pay my bills or been evicted because I couldn’t pay my rent. That doesn’t make me a better person. That makes me lucky.
Republicans are going to win one for their friends in the top floors of credit card companies and banking institutions. And Joe and millions like him will lose. And we will all learn yet another beautifully illustrated example of that great oxymoron “compassionate conservatism.”
Posted by kristin at 08:39 | Comments (2)
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05063/466154.stm
Imagine this a real life situation from this article:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-bankruptcy4mar04,0,7113947.story?coll=la-home-headlines
[from article]
In Cleveland, a municipal court judge tossed out a case that Discover Bank brought against one of its cardholders after examining the woman's credit card bill.
According to court papers, Ruth M. Owens, a 53-year-old disabled woman, paid the company $3,492 over six years on a $1,963 debt only to find that late fees and finance charges had more than doubled the size of her remaining balance to $5,564. ...
Judge Robert Triozzi ruled that Owens didn't have to pay, saying she had "clearly been the victim of [Discover's] unreasonable, unconscionable and unjust business practices."
[end article]
This legislation goes _AGAINST_ Judge Triozzi's compationate ruling. Strange that as bankruptcy claims have increased from 0.9 million in 1995 to 1.6 million in 2004 that credit card company profits more than _DOUBLED_ from $12.9 billion to $31.6 billion in the same time frame (*from the graphic in the LA Times article). Can't they just let the rotting corpses of bankruptcy lie, instead of becoming vultures?
So many of these companies are just as, if not more sleazy in my opinion than those predatory lending hell-holes you find in every strip-mall in America.
