The Great Risk Shift Continues
posted by Frank Pasquale
Mentioned in these pages in May and fresh off a positive NYT review today, Peter Gosselin has a good editorial in the L.A. Times explaining how law can intensify market-based trends toward inequality:
“People who try to claim their employer-sponsored benefits are worse off than they were two or three decades ago,” said Judge William Acker Jr., who was appointed by President Reagan to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama in Birmingham and who has written extensively about ERISA. “The law that was supposed to protect them has been turned on its head.” . . .
[O]ver the last two decades — with relatively little notice and almost no awareness on the part of the buying public — the insurance industry has changed the nature of its policies in ways that leave homeowners on the hook for vastly more than they used to be on the hook for. . . Similar changes — with similar shifts of economic risk from business and government to families — have occurred in retirement, where the switch from traditional pensions to 401(k)s has left individuals largely on their own to provide for old age.
The current recession is less a discontinuity than an intensification of trends that have left more and more Americans feeling financially vulnerable.
July 6, 2008 at 9:40 pm
Posted in: Law and Inequality
Print This Post
Responses (1)
A.J. Sutter - July 6, 2008 at 10:06 pm
AP/Yahoo News ran a story this weekend giving examples of how ERISA is being used to deny benefits: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080705/ap_on_go_su_co/benefit_battles
In an example featured in the story, the widow of a man who died from cancer at age 30 was denied benefits from an employer-sponsored life insurance policy; the employer merely refunded the premiums, which didn’t even cover the funeral costs. Upheld at the Federal Circuit level and cert denied.
Leave a Reply