The Internet

"In California, reports of deceptive sales practices for Medicare Advantage and drug plans have been the top complaints to the state Senior Medicare Patrol for the past two years, said Sandy Morales, a case manager for the group. The patrol is a federally funded program that helps seniors untangle insurance problems." "Nationwide, the Senior Medical Patrol has sent 74% more cases in the first nine months of this year than in all of 2020 to CMS and the Health and Human Services Inspector General for investigation, said Rebecca Kinney, director of the Administration for Community Living’s Office of Healthcare Information and Counseling at HHS, which oversees the patrols. She expects more complaints to come in during Medicare’s open-enrollment period. And last month, CMS officials warned the private insurance companies selling Medicare Advantage and drug plans that federal requirements prohibit deceptive sales practices." more »

Jo Freeman Reviews: This book features a selection of Ginsburg’s legal writing. In the first section, there is one appeals court brief and two transcripts of oral arguments before the Supreme Court. All on gender equality, they illustrate Ginsburg’s strategy of arguing cases where men were the legal losers in the belief that the court would be more sympathetic. Moritz concerned a section of the IRS code that allowed women, widowers and divorced men to take a tax deduction for the care of dependants. The plaintiff was a never-married man who was caring for his mother. Frontiero v. Richardson concerned the different standards for servicemen and women to get benefits for their dependent spouses. Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld challenged a portion of the social security law which permitted widows but not widowers to collect special benefits to care for minor children. more »

“The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened the risk for abuse directed towards seniors who are socially isolated and vulnerable to exploitation,” said Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta. “As this Annual Report demonstrates, the department has marshalled a wide array of tools – enforcement actions, research, public education and outreach, training and victim services – to combat elder abuse and to ensure that our seniors have the support and protections that they deserve.” “While technology has brought the world together in many ways, it has also opened the door to a myriad of fraud schemes that prey upon older adults,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco. Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) released the first 2020 Elder Fraud Report providing information useful for targeting interventions. For example, the report found that over 100,000 persons over the age of 60 filed a complaint, with a resulting loss of nearly $1 billion, although the greatest financial losses were associated with confidence fraud/romance scams. more »

Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco: "...the original passage of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) in 1994, as you have noted Mr. Chairman, had a major impact on my own life. At the time I was a young staff member on this Committee, working for then-Chairman Biden, and one of my responsibilities included responding to letters from people who wrote to the Committee. Time and again, I read firsthand accounts not only about the violence that too many people — mostly women — suffered at the hands of their intimate partners, but also about the lack of accountability for these crimes. Statistics the Committee reported during that period painted a very grim picture: 98% of rape victims never saw their attacker caught, tried and imprisoned — meaning almost all perpetrators of rape walked free. Fewer than half of people arrested for rape were convicted, and almost half of convicted rapists could expect to serve a year or less in jail." more »