Thursday, January 30, 2014

Thursday Morning LinkFest

■ From the Stupid Carrier/Government Tricks File:

"State insurance regulators have reached a settlement with the Genworth Life Insurance Company over the insurer’s use of the Social Security Administration's Death Master File database."

The carrier has agreed to more aggressively utilize the Social Security Administration's Death Master Files (DMF) to search for potential claimants.

Only one thing wrong with this whole (stupid) idea:

As we reported almost 2 years ago, "the DMF is itself rife with potential errors and misinformation" and there's no indication that this has been addressed.

Garbage in, garbage out - but hey, at least the states' insurance departments get to nick GW's policy- and other stake-holders for some quick cash.


Deadlines? What deadlines?

"The IRS [has unilaterally decided that] it will wait at least until 2015 to enforce the nondiscrimination rules, at the earliest, because defining terms such as “highly compensated employee” and “discrimination” has been difficult."

Math is hard? Who knew?

More importantly, under what authority is the IRS declining to enforce the law?
 

And speaking of IRS malfeasance, turns out they're having no problem defining how to enforce the Evil Mandate ObamaTax on ordinary citizens:

"The Internal Revenue Service has drafted a collection of proposed regulations that could determine whether some taxpayers will owe fines for failing to get health coverage ... The IRS assumes many enrollees are confused"

Gee, whatever gave them that idea?
 

This is kind of scary (if unsurprising): International Medical broker Global Underwriters has provided a "brief Travel Alert Update and Product Overview for all of our brokers and agents that have clients traveling internationally."

Specifically, there are significant concerns about the upcoming Olympics, since "[a]cts of terrorism, including targeted bombings, hostage taking, suicide bombing continue to occur in Russia particularly in the North Caucasus Region."

Is this destined to be a repeat of Munich '72?

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