The Biden administration is taking sweeping actions to combat what it calls “corporate tricks and scams” that waste people’s money and time.
The White House announced Monday the roll out of its latest “Time Is Money” initiative, which is a group of regulatory rules across several federal agencies in addition to a bunch of latest industry guidelines that corporations can decide to implement.
“The administration is cracking down on all of the ways in which corporations — through paperwork, hold times and general aggravation — waste people’s time after which really hold on to their money,” Neera Tanden, director of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, told reporters during a press briefing.
“I believe we will all relate to this,” she added. “It happens to Americans on daily basis.”
The White House didn’t provide an actual timeline of when these measures would go into effect, though senior administration officials did say that no Congressional motion is crucial to maneuver forward.
A few of the proposals would, nonetheless, have to undergo official rulemaking processes, which require rounds of public input and negotiations that typically take a yr or longer. A few of the initiatives that don’t require latest administrative rules could possibly be implemented sooner.
An end to ‘doom loop’ phone calls and faux review scams?
Specifically, White House officials underscored the effort of being stuck on “doom loop” calls when attempting to get assistance from an organization.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is crafting a latest rule to require corporations under its jurisdiction to offer callers higher access to live customer-service agents, as an alternative of letting callers languish on the phone line and get bounced around by automated answering systems. Other federal agencies are coordinating with corporations outside the financial-services industry to make similar changes without the usage of an official rule.
Similarly, Tanden said corporations often make it difficult to cancel services in hopes that individuals will lose patience and keep paying.
“It took one or two clicks to enroll, but now to finish your subscription or cancel the membership, you’ve got to go in person or wait on hold for 20 minutes, half-hour,” she said.
A forthcoming rule from the Federal Trade Commission, dubbed “click to cancel,” goals to make it as easy to cancel a subscription because it was to enroll across most consumer-facing industries. A mirroring rule announced Monday from the Federal Communications Commission would do much the identical for phone, web and cable corporations.
One other latest rule from the FTC, if enacted, would curb corporations from using fake review scams. These scams, prevalent on e-commerce sites like Amazon, often bury negative reviews on services or products, fabricate positive reviews or employ similar methods that mislead consumers into buying something that doesn’t match the outline or review rankings.
Online shopping and review scams are the second largest category of fraud reported to the FTC thus far this yr. In the primary half of 2024, the the agency received over 170,000 complaints from consumers across the country, and 78% of them said they lost no less than some money as a consequence of the problem. The everyday loss equates to $128 per person.
Efforts to cut back medical insurance bureaucracy
Time-consuming practices within the medical insurance industry are also within the crosshairs of the “Time Is Money” initiative.
“You ought to file a medical insurance claim, but the businesses make it hard to seek out the shape,” Tanden said. “Once you do, you’ve got to physically print it out, find an envelope and stamp and mail it in.”
To streamline the insurance claims and reimbursement process, the departments of Labor and Health and Human Services are calling on medical insurance corporations to permit patients to submit health claims online and to generally improve people’s experience with the medical insurance industry.
The concept is to persuade certain industries to make the improvements themselves without the necessity for official regulations or laws, and the federal government has had some recent success taking this peer-pressure approach.
For instance, as a part of the now-defunct Inexpensive Connectivity Program, the FCC worked with several web service providers to supply latest, lost-cost plans, so that individuals who received a government subsidy could effectively get broadband at no out-of-pocket cost. And recently, the Department of Transportation secured commitments from 10 major airlines to permit families with young kids to take a seat together without an upcharge.
As a part of the Biden administration’s war on “junk fees,” the transportation agency also enacted a rule in April that requires airlines to robotically reimburse passengers for certain delays and flight cancellations.
The crackdown on junk fees is an identical but separate effort from the “Time Is Money” rules, and its important goal is to eliminate shady pricing practices and hidden charges across nearly all consumer-facing industries, including overdraft fees, event-ticket surcharges, unexpected hotel fees at try, financial advisor commissions and more.
“Americans are uninterested in being played for suckers,” Tanden said.
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