Via RochesterTurning...

Rottenchester's back on the mic at The Fighting 29th, bringing you more tasty nuggets of news and analysis.  The latest is a great roundup of the NY State Senate's desperate attempts to hide their pork "Member Items".  Honestly, they're like my 5 year old daughter trying to lie her way out of having broken something:

The Albany Times-Union has been trying to get a usable list of member items since June. Their first request went to court and the court ordered release of the items. So both houses released a list with the legislator's names blacked out. The Times-Union went back to court, which ordered the release of the items with names included. In response, the Senate released a list of items as images in a "locked" PDF. This meant that it was impossible to search the text in the 3,000 page file, and cutting-and-pasting parts of the file was prohibited.

Why should you care?  Well, if you give two craps about accountability and open government, and don't want your state senator to vote against your interests then buy your love, this is kinda important.

Have you ever been in an accident? Have you ever had to go through the process of filing a claim with your auto insurance company? For any who have had their claims challenged they know that the deck is stacked against them. Insurance companies may require that claimants fill out additional forms, submit to "independent" medical examinations, and/or report to make statements under oath. Given the procedural hurdles a claimant must go through and the insurance company's ability to deny and then endlessly litigate claims, the average New York resident faces an uphill battle.

State Assemblyman Heastie has recently proposed a bill (A.8267) that would make life even easier for auto insurance companies (note that although the most recent legislative session ended the bill will likley be re-submitted as is). The bill proposes to allow insurance companies to disregard the current 30 day time limit they have to either pay or deny claims and extend it indefinitely with the caveat that the insurance company pay 2% interest a month on the claim and pay reasonable attorneys' fees once the claim is ultimately found to be valid. This measure applies across the board to all claimants that the insurance company decides to investigate for fraud. In theory, auto insurance companies would be able to indefinitely withhold benefits from all claimants in New York as long as they eventually paid 2% interest and reasonable attorneys' fees.

This law would mean that a person with a valid auto insurance claim who is incorrectly flagged and investigated as having filed a fraudulent claim may receive no payments for an indefinite period of time during which they receive nothing for their medical costs and lost wages.

Not only is this rule unfair in that it makes people wait needlessly for the valid claim that they are owed after paying their insurance premiums for years, it also assumes that a claimant can actually pay out of pocket lawyers' fees in the first place (plus their medical bills if they are uninsured), let alone that they can wait to be reimbursed for them at some unknown point in the future. This framework also creates an ironic situation in which claimants must continue to pay their premiums while their insurance company withholds the very benefits of their insurance policy from them.

Cross Posted from The 10,000 Things

New York State Senate Minority Leader and Democratic Lt Governor candidate David Paterson will be the guest speaker at the next meeting of Democracy for the Hudson-Mohawk Region on behalf of the Democracy for New York Coalition.

Who: Sen. David Paterson
When: Wednesday, June 14, 7:00 PM
Where: Democracy for the Hudson-Mohawk Region
SEIU Building
155 Washington Ave, Albany, NY (Map)
(right next to the Albany Public Library)

This weekend I was invited to join two other guest speakers as we dedicated a new Veterans Memorial Park in the small town of Odessa in Schuyler County, 30 minutes to the north of Watkins Glen in the Finger Lakes region of Western New York State.  The request came from the driving force behind the five year project to locate, fund and build this monument - the center piece of which of is a strikingly beautiful bronze statue of a mother eagle protecting two young.