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Elizabeth Warren Warns: Navient Deal a Danger to Student Loan Borrowers |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=32070"><span class="small">David Sirota, International Business Times</span></a>
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Thursday, 02 November 2017 13:54 |
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Sirota writes: "U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren warned Wednesday that the nation's largest student loan servicer has positioned itself to stealthily strip consumer protections from unwitting borrowers across the country."
Senator Elizabeth Warren. (photo: Getty)
Elizabeth Warren Warns: Navient Deal a Danger to Student Loan Borrowers
By David Sirota, International Business Times
02 November 17
 .S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren warned Wednesday that the nation’s largest student loan servicer has positioned itself to stealthily strip consumer protections from unwitting borrowers across the country. In an interview with International Business Times, she also said the loan servicer, Navient, should not be permitted to be a government contractor handling student loans on behalf of the U.S. Department of Education.
The Massachusetts Democrat was sounding an alarm about Navient’s recent acquisition of online lender Earnest. She said the transaction opened up the possibility that the company will try to boost its profits by selling debtors on refinancing their current federal student loans with the company’s own private loans — the kind that she said to do not necessarily permit income-based repayment options.
“The fear is that Navient will do this because Navient can make money off it, but the difficulty for the people who have been shifted over is that they lose many of the protections that federal law gives to them on federal loans,” said Warren, who has sponsored legislation to let borrowers refinance their federal student loans. “So long as a student holds a loan that is a federal student loan, there is a public service loan forgiveness loan program available, there are income driven repayment options, there is a borrower defense if the college cheated the student — there are protections put in place. But those critical federal protections disappear if the loan is refinanced and taken private. That could matter to many students whose loans, if Navient is successful, are shifted from being federal loans to loans that are held privately.”
Navient fired back at Warren, asserting that the lawmaker was distorting its record.
“This continues a pattern that misrepresents the good work we do to help borrowers navigate a complex system and avoid default,” said Navient spokeswoman Patricia Christel in a statement to IBT. “Under contract rules, we may not use Department of Education customer data for any marketing purpose whatsoever. We have built compliance routines to ensure strict adherence to this requirement.”
As a contractor for the Department of Education, Navient services $300 billion worth of student loans for roughly 12 million Americans. In recent weeks, the company has been unabashed about the potential upside of moving beyond just servicing loans, and into originating private student loans.
“We will add over $1 billion in new refi loans to our balance sheet this year, and I expect we will add more than $1.5 billion in new loans in 2018,” Navient CEO Jack Remondi told investors last month. “With Earnest, we’ll be a dominant originator of refi loans.”
In a letter to Remondi, Warren said the situation presents “a potentially serious conflict of interest: the company could be collecting monthly payments from federal student loan borrowers with one hand, and trying to get some of those same borrowers to trade in their federal loans for Navient/Earnest's private refinanced loans with the other hand.”
Navient — which had previously been part of Sallie Mae — has been under intensifying scrutiny after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau filed a lawsuit earlier this year against the company. The agency asserted that Navient “created obstacles to repayment by providing bad information, processing payments incorrectly, and failing to act when borrowers complained.” The suit was followed up by separate state suits filed by attorneys general — including one in Pennsylvania, where the company is headquartered.
“They were charging people excessively high interest rates…and they failed to put struggling borrowers into repayment plans that that borrower could afford,” Pennsylvania’s Democratic Attorney General Josh Shapiro told IBT. “[They’ve] taken millions of people across our country, and made it harder for them to buy a home, made it harder for them to invest in their startup business, made it harder for them to go to the grocery store, go to the mall, and purchase goods and services and things in their area that they need. These are things that ultimately harmed all of us as Americans, held all of us back, because of the corporate malfeasance that we witnessed here from Navient.”
Navient has denied those allegations, declaring that they are “unfounded and are designed to get headlines rather than help student loan borrowers.” The company’s website asserts that “53 percent of student loan balances Navient services for the government are enrolled in income-driven repayment — more than any comparable servicer.” Christel told IBT that “we lead the way” in enrolling borrowers into income-driven repayment plans, and she said government data show that federal student loans serviced by the company “produce 37 percent lower default rates.”
In her letter to Navient’s CEO, Warren challenged that statistic.
“The allegations in the CFPB's lawsuit raise questions about whether the company has managed default rates by simply encouraging borrowers to postpone payments by railroading them into forbearance periods that delay repayment in exchange for the accrual of interest,” she wrote.
Amid the CFPB suit, Navient has in recent months boosted its lobbying spending in Washington. An IBT review of federal records show that during the first three quarters of the year — as Republican lawmakers have sought to defang the CFPB — the company has spent more than $2.3 million on lobbying, which is a 17 percent increase over the same time period in 2016. Federal records show Navient has sought to influence the policies governing the CFPB.
During the CFPB litigation, Navient said that its top priority is not necessarily safeguarding borrowers.
“The servicer acts in the lender's interest,” the company declared in court filings. “There is no expectation that the servicer will ‘act in the interest of the consumer.’”
Warren cited that statement — and Navient being fined $97 million for overcharging service members on student loans — as reasons lawmakers should be concerned about the potential for abuse in the company’s acquisition of a private lender. “In my view a company like that should not have hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts to handle student loans,” she told IBT.
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New Study Confirms High-Pesticide Produce Linked to Lower Fertility Rates |
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Thursday, 02 November 2017 13:32 |
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Nosowitz writes: "The results are pretty staggering: of those subjects who consumed more than 2.3 servings per day of high-residue fruits and vegetables, the study found an 18 percent lower probability of getting pregnant and a 23 percent lower probability of successfully giving birth."
Produce in a grocery store. (photo: Shutterstock)
New Study Confirms High-Pesticide Produce Linked to Lower Fertility Rates
By Dan Nosowitz, Modern Farmer
02 November 17
 ews that there may be a correlation between exposure to pesticides and infertility is not new; studies have previously tied higher rates of exposure to decreased male fertility.
But a new study, primarily from researchers at Harvard University's T.H. Chan School of Public Health, takes a look specifically at women who are already undergoing infertility treatment. And the results seem to have surprised even the researchers, according to a CNN report.
The study looked at 325 women undergoing infertility treatment at Mass General Hospital in Boston. The researchers looked for correlations in whether women successfully got pregnant and gave birth with their diets. The subjects self-reported what they ate, and the researchers took careful note of the amounts of fruits and vegetables associated with very high levels of pesticide residue, based on U.S. Deparement of Agriculture data. (That data shows up in lists like the EWG's Dirty Dozen).
Among those fruits and vegetables with the highest levels of pesticide residue are spinach, strawberries and peaches; those with low levels of pesticide residue include avocados and onions.
The results are pretty staggering: of those subjects who consumed more than 2.3 servings per day of high-residue fruits and vegetables, the study found an 18 percent lower probability of getting pregnant and a 23 percent lower probability of successfully giving birth. There seemed to be no correlation between those women who consumed lots of low-residue fruits and vegetables.
This study is not a perfect proof of causality; the women surveyed are demographically limited by geographic location (being that they're all seeking treatment from a single hospital), and they were all seeking fertility treatment in the first place, which might skew the findings. And, of course, the study relied on self-reporting, which can have flaws, too.
But this could be a serious call to action for those seeking to prove a link between infertility and pesticides in our food, even when that food is objectively healthful stuff like strawberries and spinach.
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FOCUS: The Health Care Crisis No One Is Talking About |
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Thursday, 02 November 2017 11:58 |
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Sanders writes: "The United States faces a major crisis in primary health care, and unless Congress acts immediately it is likely to become much worse."
Senator Bernie Sanders. (photo: Getty)
The Health Care Crisis No One Is Talking About
By Bernie Sanders, The Boston Globe
02 November 17
 he United States faces a major crisis in primary health care, and unless Congress acts immediately it is likely to become much worse.
Millions of Americans are at risk of losing their access to health care because Congress did not renew funding for the community health center program at the end of the fiscal year, Sept. 30. Unless we renew funding immediately, 70 percent of funding will be cut, the doors of 2,800 community health centers will close, and 9 million patients will lose access to quality health care. That is unacceptable.
Our nation’s community health centers provide affordable, high-quality health care to more than 27 million people. This includes not only primary health care, but also dentistry, counseling, and low-cost prescription drugs. For the 13 million rural patients served, community health centers often are the only health care provider for hundreds of miles. And they provide good jobs in communities that need them the most.
Community health centers not only save lives, they also save money. Instead of people ending up in expensive emergency room care, or in the hospital, they get the primary care they need, when they need it, at high quality medical centers. Compared to other providers, community health centers save on average $2,371 per Medicaid patient and up to $1,210 per Medicare patient. What’s more, community health centers have played a pivotal role in generating more than $49 billion in savings to the entire health care system.
Not only do we have to renew funding for the community health center program, we must also improve and expand the National Health Service Corps — the program that provides debt forgiveness for young doctors, nurses, dentists, mental health providers, and pharmacists who are prepared to work in our nation’s most underserved areas. Without debt forgiveness, it is very hard to get new doctors to choose primary care — an area of medicine that does not pay the big bucks. It is also difficult to attract medical professionals into the underserved areas of our country where they are needed the most.
It is widely acknowledged that we currently have the most wasteful, inefficient, and expensive health care system in the world. Despite spending almost $10,000 per capita on health care, twice as much as any other country, 28 million Americans have no insurance, even more are underinsured, with high copayments and deductibles, and we pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. The rarely discussed truth is that thousands of Americans die each year because they cannot afford to get to a doctor when they should.
We must not allow a bad situation to get worse.
We cannot tell millions of low-income and working people in every state in this country that they will no longer be able to access the health care, dental care, mental health counseling, and low-cost prescription drugs they desperately need.
We cannot tell pregnant women that they will not be able to get the necessary prenatal care they require in order to have healthy babies.
We cannot tell the young person addicted to opioids or heroin that there is no treatment available.
We cannot tell chronically ill senior citizens that they will have to survive without the prescription drugs they have used for years.
We cannot force community health centers, which provide some of the most cost-effective health care in the country, to lay off the doctors, nurses, dentists, and administrators who keep these centers going.
Historically, the community health center program has enjoyed widespread bipartisan support, and that support continues. Today, along with almost all Democrats, there are a number of Republicans who fully understand how important these centers are to the well-being of their states and want to see the program refunded.
The time for delay is over. Congress must act immediately to fully fund the community health center program and the associated workforce programs that provide them with the well-trained staffing they need.
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FOCUS: Paul Ryan Is Choking on His Own Mystery Meat |
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Thursday, 02 November 2017 11:07 |
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Krugman writes: "House Republicans were supposed to unveil their tax proposal today, but it has been put off."
House Speaker Paul Ryan. (photo: Getty)
Paul Ryan Is Choking on His Own Mystery Meat
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
02 November 17
 ouse Republicans were supposed to unveil their tax proposal today, but it has been put off — and not, as you might imagine, because they’re a bit worried that their grand opening might be overshadowed by the indictment of Trump’s campaign manager and sworn testimony of collusion between campaign officials and Russia.
No, they’re delaying because on the verge of trying to pass a huge change in the U.S. tax system, they still haven’t settled on key parts of the proposal — specifically, how to pay for huge corporate tax cuts and large cuts to wealthy individuals.
But wait — how is this possible? Republicans, and specifically Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, have been talking about tax “reform” and putting out white papers for years — actually, since 2010. How can basic things be up in the air at this late date?
READ MORE
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hen Franklin D. Roosevelt died, his casket was placed on a train that slowly traversed the country before it made its way toward his final resting place. Crowds were gathered at the train stops so people could pay their final respects, and as the train was pulling into Washington’s Union Station, a journalist saw a man who, like others, came to say his final farewell. The man was standing there with solemn eyes, and tears streaming down his face. The journalist approached the man and asked, “sir, did you know President Roosevelt?” The man lifted his head and replied, “no, but he knew me.”
