I read the news almost every few hours, and here are some of the highlights of the business news that made me spit out my tea this week.
1. Countrywide fatcats get 19 million dollars in “performance incentives” - Bank of America is taking over Countrywide Financial, and they will be disbursing “stock valued at $10 million for chief executive Angelo Mozilo and $9 million for President David Sambol”. Gee, lets see what the performance of the company was. The stock price went from over $40 to around $6. The entire time the stock was in free fall Mozilo was dumping his shares. There are over 14,000 homes owned by Countrywide currently listed on their site valued at nearly 3 billion dollars. My only question is, how can I find a job where I can be a royal screwup and still get rewarded $10 million? Then maybe I could buy this house.
2. Walmart sues brain damaged employee - Apparently Walmart’s health plan states that if an employee gains healthcare money in a legal settlement, they are supposed to pay Walmart back. So a woman who suffered an accident that made her brain damaged and disabled is being sued by Walmart for half a million dollars. All she has is 277k left in her settlement and there is no way she could pay Walmart back. It is pretty sad and the case is inciting a lot of public outrage. Walmart makes billions of dollars a year, and they have a clause in their health plan that says employees have to pay it back if they had the money? That is a ridiculous health plan. The employee in this case paid for her insurance, and isn’t the point of health insurance to cover accidents? I’ve never bought anything from Walmart, and I probably never will.
3. The Fed loans another $100 billion - According to the article, “The Fed has worked some positive magic.” That phrase just invoked an image of Bernanke in a pink tutu flying around spreading wads of cash. I wonder when this fairy dust is going to come back and bite us in the rear.
4. Qwest in Colorado tells employees to pee in plastic bags - Apparently some supervisor didn’t like the long bathroom breaks his reports were taking. So he distributed urinal bags! Wow, that is really one crazy boss.
5. Viagra turns 10 - It is kind of funny that the 10th birthday of this little blue pill made national headlines. I don’t see anyone celebrating the birthday of penicillin or digitalis. Anyway, I don’t have anything against Viagra except for all those annoying spam messages that say “xxVIAXXgra”. Oh crap, now my blog is going to get Viagra ads.
I wonder what next week will bring. Have a great weekend everyone!
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5 comments ↓
Just want to explain the Walmart thing..first..the real crooks are this woman’s attorneys. She gets a $1 million settlement from the trucking company and all she gets is $417,000 to put in trust to cover her health care needs? That is 58.3% in legal fees!
Next - all insurance companies have a subrogation clause. They pay for the health costs in good faith they will be repaid in case there is a legal settlement that covers healthcare costs. For this woman to keep the money that Walmart paid out would be considered unjust enrichment. Her settlement was supposed to cover ALL healthcare costs..that means even what Walmart paid out on her behalf. She got paid twice if she doesn’t return the money. As I said, the real crooks here are her attorneys for taking 58% of her settlement.
While most insurance policies have this clause, not all of them pursue it equally. I worked for a big software company that was self-insured. We had an employee that was in a bad traffic accident. When the other person’s insurance finally paid out, he called about making a reimbursement. The company recognized that he was out of pocket for a lot of things that the health insurance didn’t cover and told him not to worry about paying the money back.
Just because a company *can* go after that money, doesn’t mean that doing so is the right thing to do. Sure, if someone broke their leg and didn’t have any long term impairment or lost time off work, then settlements should go towards paying back for health insurance payouts. But in a case like this, it’s criminal for a billion dollar company like Wal-Mart to go after someone with a life-time impairment. Even if she’d kept all of that million dollars, it wouldn’t be enough to pay for her lifetime care.
This is just one of the many reasons that I absolutely refuse to shop at Wal-Mart ever again. They are the very worst example of an uncaring big company.
Oh God, can we please quit pretending that just because Wal-Mart is big and everyone analyzes their every move that they are any different than any other company - big or small? In fact they have to be much more environmentally friendly and have better benefits and be more “caring” than most companies because they are so in the public eye.
And for heaven’s sake, being “a billion dollar company” doesn’t mean squat, positive or negative. Billions in revenue means billions in expenses. I am so tired of people referring to “billion dollar companies” like they owe us something extra simply for being big.
I say boo to the lawyers as well - i’m not sure i have any huge problem with what walmart did - ill advised? Yes. Illegal? no. Walmart will be taking a huge beating in the press because of this -but i think the real criminals are those lawyers who took so much of the settlement.
Interesting—I didn’t know digitalis was used as a medicine. I just remembered it was that sweet-tasting poison that the freaky little twin girl put in Coke to poison someone in the X-Files (and hey, it’s mentioned in wikipedia).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digitalis#Appearances_in_fiction
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