GE Money rips off the elderly

Since January I have spent hours helping a neighbor whose attempts to pay his creditor, GE Money (doing business as CareCredit), were all being headed off. Whether he used the website or the telephone, he was unable to complete the transaction, and was in danger of expensive penalties. Reaching a customer service rep required unusual persistence, and once he did so, the employees were consistently unhelpful, besides being alternately hostile and contemptuous.

After research, I formed the following hypothesis:

GE Money Bank formed CareCredit, and tricked it out to look like a nonprofit, in order to mislead elderly, inexperienced, or otherwise vulnerable customers into signing up for a credit card that is easy to acquire but difficult to make timely payments on. This results in crippling penalties and interest on what is touted as an “interest-free” credit option. Instead of helping customers pay their health-care bills, CareCredit is more likely to punish customers with extra expenses.

As the president and congressional leaders meet today on financial regulation, I offer this story as evidence of which direction we need to be going now. It is not in our national interest to allow banks to take customers for everything they can get, while “denying any wrongdoing.” We need an independent financial consumer protection agency with the power to intervene in the interest of consumers.

Don’t call it PACT if it isn’t one

The State of Alabama is in trouble with parents of college-bound students. Like seventeen other states, Alabama created a tuition savings program designed to cover the cost of tuition to a state college or university. The Alabama program, called PACT (Prepaid Affordable College Tuition), bears the state’s implicit guarantee that participants will save enough to […]

Collecting debts from the dead

I have an elderly neighbor who is certain to die in crushing credit card debt. So this NYT article on a “new frontier” in debt collection grabbed my attention. (Edge of the West linked to it here.) It’s a profile of DCM Services, specialists in getting the bereaved to assume responsibility for the unsecured debts […]

Shopping in a global economy

So I need to replace the lenses in my glasses to match a new prescription from the eye doctor. Thanks to the globalization of lens grinding, I am having to fill the prescription twice. That’s because in all of metro Birmingham (pop. 975,000), there is not a single optician who makes lenses on the premises. […]

False promises to the jobless

Looking over Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bait and Switch, a 2005 exposé on the decline of the middle class, I found descriptions of the following three alternatives for the downsized corporate manager. Franchising, also known as “buying yourself a job,” is the purchase of the right to operate a local franchise of a major corporation. Most of […]