{"id":181721,"date":"2016-04-04T18:59:00","date_gmt":"2016-04-04T23:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/04\/04\/is-there-nothing-which-financial-innovations-cannot-crapify\/"},"modified":"2016-04-04T18:59:00","modified_gmt":"2016-04-04T23:59:00","slug":"is-there-nothing-which-financial-innovations-cannot-crapify","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/04\/04\/is-there-nothing-which-financial-innovations-cannot-crapify\/","title":{"rendered":"Is there Nothing Which Financial “Innovations” Cannot Crapify?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It appears that the latest innovation proposed is, “Securitizing Loans for Large Health Care Expenses<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

I did not think that we could make healthcare delivery worse in the United States.<\/p>\n

To quote Rick Blaine, “I was misinformed.”<\/p>\n

I saw this headline in Kaiser Health News \u2014 \u201cMortgages For Expensive Health Care? Some Experts Think It Can Work\u201d<\/a> \u2014 so I said, \u201cNah,\u201d and ignored it for a couple days, but then I clicked through to the academic paper Kaiser linked to \u2014 if \u201cacademic\u201d has any meaning, the times being what they are \u2014 and I couldn\u2019t find any tells that it was a parody or some kind of sick joke, so yeah. It\u2019s for real! The paper is called \u201cBuying cures versus renting health: Financing health care with consumer loans,\u201d<\/a> by Vahid Montazerhodjat, David M. Weinstock, and Andrew W. Lo, and it was published in Science Translational Medicine<\/i> (STM), February 24, 2016. First, I\u2019ll present the author\u2019s scheme, and after briefly showing how it conforms to the simple rules of neoliberalism<\/a>, I\u2019ll look at potential scope creep if the proposal is implemented, debt-cropping, and the possibility of predatory servicing. I\u2019ll conclude with a 30,000-foot view of the scheme\u2019s implications. (I\u2019m afraid I\u2019m thinking of this post in terms of somebody who\u2019s take out one of these loans \u2014 a consumer<\/s> patient \u2014 rather from the finance perspective that Yves would offer. That said, readers with more nuts-and-bolts knowledge of securization than I have \u2014 like most of you \u2014 please feel free to chime in; that\u2019s why I\u2019m describing the scheme first.) <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The article goes further into the details, and each detail is more and more horrifying.<\/p>\n

Really horrifying:  Repossessing your kidney horrifying. <\/p>\n

It is a descent into what Matt Stoller calls, “Debtcropping<\/a>,” which is, as he notes, “An instrument of political and economic control.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It appears that the latest innovation proposed is, “Securitizing Loans for Large Health Care Expenses.” I did not think that we could make healthcare delivery worse in the United States. To quote Rick Blaine, “I was misinformed.” I saw this headline in Kaiser Health News \u2014 \u201cMortgages For Expensive Health Care? Some Experts Think It …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,969,1004,1046],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-evil","category-finance","category-healthcare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181721"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181721\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}