A few years ago an occasional reader complained that I was a bit of a curmudgeon (who, me?) and that I rarely talked up good news. So, once a week for about five weeks I religiously posted some good news. I’m not sure if the well ran completely dry, or I just returned to my natural ways, but it’s been a while since I clicked the good news category.
All this is by way of saying that there is good news today, and it has nothing to do with Donald Trump:
The federal agency that controls more than $1 trillion in Medicare and Medicaid funding has moved to prevent nursing homes from forcing claims of elder abuse, sexual harassment and even wrongful death into the private system of justice known as arbitration.
An agency within the Health and Human Services Department on Wednesday issued a rule that bars any nursing home that receives federal funding from requiring that its residents resolve any disputes in arbitration, instead of court.
This really is good news, one more positive action of the Obama administration, as it prepares to leave town. If we had a Congress that had any interest at all in serving the American people, these clauses would be banned outright in any consumer contract. The corporate world, with the enthusiastic assistance of the entire Supreme Court, has been slowly building an alternate and rigged “justice” system, just for itself. It’s a shame that Obama can’t see that the TPP does precisely the same thing, which is the real reason why most informed opponents are against it. In any event, this is a very good thing.
There is a legal doctrine under which clauses like this can be invalidated by a court. A “contract of adhesion” is a contract imposed by a stronger party upon a weaker. It’s one sided in the sense that the weaker party has no opportunity to really negotiate terms and has no bargaining power. It’s hard to imagine a contract that fits this bill more than one for a nursing home. (If you’ve ever been involved in the transfer of a person from a hospital to a nursing home, you know what I mean.) A court can step in and invalidate outrageous terms, such as the arbitration clauses at issue here. However, courts rarely take that step, and there’s no reason why the burden should be on the victim to go through the time and expense involved in litigating the issue.
Obama really has done a lot of good things, much of it under the radar, during his last year in office. All the more reason to make sure it doesn’t all get reversed by the Orange Man.
Anyway, good news.
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