It’s no secret why employers and corporations love arbitration: The process is a raw deal for the little guy. The arbitrators who preside over these cases may not be bound by substantive law, meaning victims can’t get the damages they’d get in actual court. Nor are arbitrators constrained by the procedural safeguards of the judicial system. The company accused of wrongdoing generally gets to choose the venue, which may be far away from the victim’s home. Victims must pay their own way, not just for travel but for legal representation. Arbitration outcomes are frequently confidential, but all available data suggests that victims fare poorly.

Recognizing that the deck is stacked against them, countless victims do not even attempt to arbitrate when they’ve been swindled. This choice, sadly, might be a rational one. Individually, employees’ injuries may not amount to much—a few hundred dollars, say, in a typical case of wage theft, when an employee claims an employer failed to pay them money they were owed. A class-action lawsuit would be the most logical way to recoup that money, in light of how small the individual claims are.Who would spend thousands of dollars in legal fees to recover hundreds of dollars in backpay? And that, of course, is the point. Companies know that if you can’t sue collectively, you probably won’t file claims at all.

The original sin here is a law called the Federal Arbitration Act or, more accurately, the Supreme Court’s misinterpretation of the FAA. Congress initially intended this measure, which was passed in 1925, to help speed up commercial disputes between businesses. Scholars have persuasively demonstrated that the law was never meant to apply to employment or consumer contracts, or to curb states’ ability to regulate these contracts.

But beginning in the 1980s, corporate attorneys began to persuade courts that the law was, in fact, a loaded gun aimed at class-action litigation and access to the courts. A young lawyer named John Roberts spearheaded this effort, so it is no surprise that, as chief justice of the United States, he has helped enshrine this warped conception of the FAA into law. In an early case, 1984’s Southland Corp. v. Keating, the court began to reinvigorate the FAA; it threw out a class-action lawsuit brought by 7-Eleven franchisees against their parent company for fraud, ruling that the FAA supplants state law. The court built upon that flawed decision in 2001’s Circuit City v. Adams, allowing Circuit City to force its workers into arbitration if they tried to sue. . . .

Stories and stats from Oregon’s Prescription Drug Price Transparency Program

Salem – The Oregon Department of Consumer and Business Services released its first report to the Legislature on prescription drug prices in Oregon. The program is the first in the United States to gather and publicly disclose comprehensive data about prescription drugs.

Before the report was finalized, a public hearing was held in November where Oregonians shared stories of how the cost of drugs affects their lives.

One story came from a nurse who helps patients with diabetes:

“I often found my patients would simply go without their diabetes medications because they could not afford them. We had a pharmacy at our safety net clinic that could provide lower cost medications, but even with our lower prices, many patients could not afford insulin and other diabetes medications.”

Another was from an Oregonian who cannot retire because of the cost of prescriptions:

“My spouse needs to take Eliquis, 5 milligrams, twice-a-day. A 90-day supply costs $1,343. Again, why so much? My spouse has nine different prescriptions that have to be taken. Another costs $400 for a 30-day supply. My spouse is retired, and Social Security is only $1,200 a month. I continue to work to receive insurance benefits to cover those drug costs. I cannot retire until my spouse dies; I can’t afford to.”

“The stories we received were heartbreaking, emotional, and insightful,” said Andrew Stolfi, Oregon insurance commissioner. “The data taught us a lot, and the consumer stories confirmed exactly why this program matters for all Oregonians.”

The report reveals several findings and provides recommendations for legislative changes to reduce the effect of rising prescription drug costs.

Findings include:

• U.S. prices are typically five times more than the highest price globally for prescription drugs reported to the program. For example, the median price for cardiovascular drugs reported to the program was $580, while the majority of prices in other countries ranged from $5 to $164.

• Most of the annual price increases reported to the program range from the reporting minimum of 10 percent to approximately 20 percent. Manufacturers attribute these increases to rebates, the use of co-pay assistance programs, obligations to shareholders, research and development costs, and other related factors.

Recommendations include:

• Patient assistance reporting for new prescription drug reports – New drug reports currently do not include any patient assistance information, despite several new drugs coming to market with patient assistance.
• Transparency across the pharmaceutical supply chain – The price of a prescription drug is influenced by several factors, including the interactions and financial negotiations between pharmaceutical supply chain entities. These entities can influence the price paid at the pharmacy counter, the cost of health insurance premiums, and how prescription drugs contribute to overall health care costs.

The program will continue to build upon the information received in the first year to improve the program for the future and to continue to understand the effect of drug prices and costs. As more information is received, the program will engage in analyses to inform policies to reduce the cost of prescription drugs to Oregonians.
All Oregonians can access the report and view the public hearing by visiting the program’s website.

All Oregonians are encouraged to report an increase in the cost of their prescription drugs or share their story one of four ways:

• Email Rx.prices@oregon.gov
• Call 833-210-4560 (toll-free)
• Online consumer price increase report
• Share your prescription drug price increase story

For more information, visit dfr.oregon.gov/drugtransparency.

COPY, PASTE, LEGISLATE

Used car dealers didn’t want to fix deadly defects, so they wrote a law to avoid it
By Rui Kaneya with Pratheek Rebala, Center for Public Integrity

Carlos Solis never knew he was driving with a “shrapnel bomb” inside his steering wheel.

The 35-year-old father of two was waiting to make a left turn on a suburban road outside Houston when another car struck the front end of his Honda Accord, triggering its airbags.
Instead of protecting Solis, the defective airbags shot a piece of metal into his neck and severed his carotid artery, killing him within minutes.

Solis knew nothing about the danger: A used-car dealer sold him the car without fixing the airbags or warning him that Honda had recalled the vehicle three years earlier, according to a lawsuit filed by his family.

By the time Solis was killed in 2015, similar accidents were piling up nationwide amid an unprecedented series of recalls for an array of dangerous defects – from shrapnel-flinging airbags to ignition switches that shut off engines.

For auto dealers, the string of accidents was a warning sign of what was to come: a barrage of lawsuits filed against them for selling recalled used cars without fixing them first.

Auto dealers came up with a plan to preempt the problem.

They crafted what’s known as “model legislation” that would allow them to continue selling recalled used cars, so long as they disclosed open recalls to customers somewhere in a stack of sales documents. They then turned to their army of lobbyists – more than 600 on call in 43 states – to help get the measure passed, one state at a time.

The effort is paying off.  (read the rest here)

The success of auto dealers’ effort is a case study in how special interest groups with deep pockets go from state to state with model legislation – copy-and-paste measures that can be handed to friendly lawmakers in any state – to get the policies they want, often with little public scrutiny and sometimes with tragic consequences.

During a two-year investigation, the Center for Public Integrity, USA TODAY and the Arizona Republic found thousands of similar pieces of legislation and retraced a number of them to their root. Many were written by corporations or special interest groups that stood to benefit directly. Some are pitched as public-service measures.

SIDEBAR: This story was produced as part of a collaboration between USA TODAY, the Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity. More than 30 reporters across the country were involved in the two-year investigation, which identified copycat bills in every state. The team used a unique data-analysis engine built on hundreds of cloud computers to compare millions of words of legislation provided by LegiScan.In the past five years, versions of auto dealers’ copycat bill have been introduced in at least 11 states – California, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Virginia. So far only Tennessee and Pennsylvania have adopted them, but Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey and New York still have measures under consideration.