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By now you have heard the first of umpteen TV and radio commercials, brought to you by companies who stand to lose big bucks if this nation reforms its weird, balkanized, for-profit, expensive and money-sucking system of private health insurance.

Those interests include the health insurance companies, the Chamber of Commerce, and the freakishly right-wing, deceivingly named National Taxpayers Union. Many more will emerge from the woodwork before this fight is over.

Just like these slick liars did back when they successfully fought health-care reform in 1992, these interests are motivated only by money -- specifically, by the prospect of losing yours. Because they're getting a whole bunch of it right now.

Among other things, those premiums you pay are financing the 3,000+ health-care lobbyists they have deployed in Washington. Those lobbyists are hard at work defending the loopholes those companies use to deny you coverage (even though you've paid your premiums) or the fine print in your contracts that allows them to cancel customers who get sick. The industry puts an innocuous-sounding name on this practice: rescission.

They will use every sleazy, cheap trick they can dream up to instill fear of reform in the hearts of the good, hard-working people of America.

This year is a little bit different, of course. We already have heard from the former CIGNA PR exec about the lies he told to help his former employer preserve its slice of the health-care dollar pie. We have heard of the congressional hearing in which health insurance execs defended the practice of canceling policies of sick clients, and said they would continue to do that.

And now we have Andy, in the video above.

Folks, it is time to wake up and realize that these greedy bloodsuckers are far, far less trustworthy than televangelists, personal injury lawyers, used car salespeople, and (yea) journalists. They were child shoplifters who graduated to bookmaking and then turned to the health-insurance industry because illegal gambling and loan sharking were such honest games they found them boring.

They are grifters who care about your money ONLY to the extent that they can siphon it out of your paycheck or wallet. You're not a human being to them. You're a mark, a dweeb, a boob -- just like you are to any other scam artist.

The American Medical Association and others have figured this out. What about you?

Wikimedia Commons

Some folks on this blog have asked about my "brush" with the Church of Scientology and the impertinent question I asked that got me chased out of one of their centers by a livid, screaming Scientologist. Here's the story, which I wrote up many years ago.

It happened in the fall 1978 and spring of 1979. It remains a story that I tell to this day, part weird, part spooky, part hilarious. Happy Halloween!

Of course, because it’s one of my tales it involves a bike and a girl.

I was junior at the University of Maryland at College Park, living off-campus in a group house in nearby Hyattsville. One warm fall Sunday, I took the afternoon off from my studies and got on my bike and rode down Rhode Island Avenue to toward downtown Washington D.C., about 10 miles away.

I rode on the mall and down to the Tidal Basin, visited the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, then kept going on a bridge across the Potomac River and into Virginia. A few miles down Lee Highway I stopped at a 7-Eleven for a drink. As I sipped a Mountain Dew, a slender, blond-haired man in a gray suit walked by me and said “hello.” I said "hi" back, and he kept on walking to another business in the plaza.

Now the reason I had ventured pretty deep into Arlington on not-very-bicycle-friendly Lee Highway was the girl. M. was a tall, pretty brunette whom I’d met in Annapolis the previous summer. She was way out of my league but for some reason she liked me. My then-girlfriend was in Montana, her then-boyfriend was in New York, we were both a little lonely – it was that kind of thing. We’d gotten together now and then, and once I’d accompanied her to her a large night class at Georgetown Law School, where I had great fun embarrassing her by pretending I was a student and attempting to answer her professor's classroom questions.

Read more »

David Miscavige, leader of the Church of Scientology /Nightline, ABC

A court in Paris found the Church of Scientology guilty of fraud and fined it $900,000. From The Associated Press:

Prosecutors had urged that the group be disbanded in France and fined euro2 million. A law that was briefly on the books this year prevented the court from going so far as to disband the French branch of Scientology in Tuesday's verdict—though it could have taken the lesser step of shutting down its operations.

However, the court did not do so, ruling that French Scientologists would have continued their activities anyway "outside any legal framework."

A spokeswoman for the French branch of Scientology, Agnes Bron, said the verdict was "an Inquisition of modern times," a reference to efforts to rout out heretics of the Roman Catholic Church in centuries past.

If anyone's interested, I could tell you about my own brief brush with this unusual cult, which culminated, 30 years ago, with a screaming Scientologist physically chasing me out of the Church of Scientology's Arlington Mission.

All because I asked an honest, though somewhat impertinent, question.

The postcard we received from Verizon Saturday, Sept. 19

On the left is a postcard Verizon sent us informing us that we were ineligible for a rebate on a wireless telephone we recently purchased.

I bought this telephone as a birthday present for my son last month. And we sent in all the required materials to Verizon for the $50 rebate almost immediately, and well before the deadline.

The message on the left (sorry for the fine print, but what you see is the actual size) says they can't honor the rebate because the ESN/MEID number (whatever that is) "already has been associated with a previous rebate."

So I called the number on the postcard and spoke to a Verizon rebate rep. Within seconds, he told me he had discovered an error on their part. They corrected that, and our rebate check would be issued shortly.

What was the error? I asked him.

Somebody in the rebate office had typed a 'B' instead of an 'A,' or something like that, when entering the code in a computer, he said.

If I hadn't called we would not have gotten the rebate. And we most likely would have forgotten about it.

Here's what I don't like about this:

1. Most of the card, with the exception of the name and address (which I obscured) is in tiny, 4-point type. It's difficult to read even with my cheaters on.
2. Verizon already has the ability to check and make sure that the codes are entered correctly. How do I know? Because the rep did it himself within a matter of seconds, almost as soon as I called. I didn't even have to give him the correct code (which I didn't even know, anyway). He looked it up.
3. Under many circumstance, this innocuous postcard would have gotten lost in the daily pile of mail we typically receive, and dumped into the trash. It just so happens that we got very little mail on Saturday, so this stood out more than usual.

I suspect, although I don't know for certain, that this is the latest and greatest way wireless phone companies are using to avoid paying rebates.

Why do I suspect it? It's because of articles like this one, from Scambusters.org.

As you can see from clicking on the link above, avoiding paying rebates is a very big business.

Don't let yourself fall for this, folks.

from Wikimedia Commons

I've had a healthy response from readers to the column about Jed Yatzor and the billboard he made decrying Bank of America.

"In my opinion, Bank of America are crooks," It says.

Yatzor is definitely not alone. Most of the readers who responded tell tales of jacked-up interest rates, lowered limits and/or canceled cards - because they paid them off each month, not because they welched on monthly payments.

Here are some other credit card horror stories.

Do you have such a story? Let's hear them. Put your comments on this thread, or the earlier one. I'll follow up on this next week.

Please, please, please put a REAL email address in the address field (visible by me only) when you make a post. That will help me contact you if I want to use your stuff. And in the post, tell us what locality you live in, and state, if it's not Virginia.

On the one hand you can kind of understand why Army reservist Stefan Frederick Cook recently had an attorney file "conscientious objector" status for him AFTER he was activated for duty.

Let's face it: Stefan doesn't want to go to Afghanistan. Perhaps he doesn't want to leave his family. Maybe he's concerned about being wounded or killed.

I mean, who wants to go to a war zone?

On the other hand:

• 1) Look pal, this is what you signed up for when you joined the reserves. You got some of benefits out of that, right? You got the GI Bill, or grad school paid for - well dude, this is the way it works now. It's not like back with 'Nam, in Dick Cheney's or Bill Clinton's or Newt Gingrich's day, when you trusted multiple deferments to keep you from seeing action. No, there is a definite quid pro quo, and that means you should go.
• 2) Given the circumstances, your "conscientious objector" ploy is the most sissy-ass way of avoiding service to our country that I could ever imagine. It's not like you're a Quaker or anything. Aren't you ashamed to pull a stunt like this? Jeez, claiming our President ISN'T our president because of some weird, technical (and unfactual) loophole? That just screams "SISSY" all the way around.

Have some pride, darn it! At least Rush Limbaugh got  out for a medical condition. (He had a cyst on his butt or something like that). It is far more dignified to claim that you've suddenly gone cross-eyed to get out of serving. Or that your sexual orientation has changed, and that you're gay. That will get you out of serving real quick, now that "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is still in force despite Obama's promises.

During World War II that worked like a charm for Lenny Bruce. All he had to do was grab another serviceman in the shower and he was OUT faster than you can say Jack Robinson.

Please and spare us this "He's not President!" garbage.

This stupid claim has been debunked over and over.

Sooner or later I will leave this job at The Roanoke Times.

And lately, I've been thinking about the future after a long and fun newspaper career.

I will go into business for myself. It will be a consumer lending (ahem) store.

I'll call it "Casey's Ripoff Loans." The motto will be "The Loan Shark You Will Love." And our advertising slogan will be, "We cheat you honestly, unlike those other chiselers."

Of course, none of this would be possible if it wasn't for the Virginia General Assembly and former governor (and now U.S. Senator) Mark Warner, so let's thank them right now.

Once upon a time, Virginia was incredibly stingy about the interest a small lender in Virginia could charge a mark (sorry, I meant 'customer'). It was something like 36 percent a year.

Then in 2002, the dopes (sorry, I meant 'brilliant lawmakers') in the General Assembly fell hook, line and sinker for a con game rigged by loan sharks (sorry, I meant 'the fringes of the consumer lending industry').

To make a long story short, they raised the cap on small, short-term "payday" loans to up to 782 percent per year.

In other words, they legalized loan sharking in Virginia.

Read the rest of the story here.

Check out the Predatory Lending Association Web site.

Comment on payday, car-title and open-ended lending below!

If you have a gas grill that you've fired up this season, chances are that you buy your tanks from those convenient racks outside major supermarkets, convenience store chains or a major retailer like Wal-mart. And if that's the case, chances are you're getting badly ripped off.

Last year, the propane prices soared. But the prices of those prefilled tanks did not. That's because the clever companies that market them simply put less gas in them. In other words, they shortchanged you.

Now that prices have tumbled, you might think they'd fill then back up, right? No. They're still putting less propane in them, keeping the prices the same and making out like bandits.

A propane refill center, where you can save a lot of money!

Fortunately, there's a simple way around this: Don't buy the prefilled tanks. Instead, take your tank to a refill center. The one I use is Northwest Hardware on Brambleton Avenue in Roanoke.

Over the years, I've found that a refilled tank at Northwest Hardware usually costs a little more than half of what those gougers selling prefilled (but not full) tanks charge.

And bonus: Northwest Hardware actually fills it up!

They were charging $2.99 per gallon last time I needed some propane.

Also, read below for an interesting comment by Doug and his tip about expiration dates on tanks.

Readers: What's YOUR favorite hardware store, and why? Answer the question with a comment.