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A challenging year for U.S. consumers Media mega-mergers. Spiraling prices of prescription drugs. Staggering numbers of identity-theft victims. As the year closes, consumers face high-stakes battles in those and other areas of a complex, ever-changing marketplace. Consumers Union has tried to focus the public and policy-makers on these and other issues critical to consumers’ health, safety, and pocketbooks. What follows are the highlights: Media ownership. When the Federal Communications Commission considered relaxing the rules on media ownership--a move that would let media conglomerates swallow up local TV stations and newspapers--Consumers Union launched a major advocacy campaign to preserve media-ownership limits. CU believes the limits are needed to ensure that consumers get diverse, competitive, and local media outlets in their communities. The response from the public and lawmakers may force the FCC to rewrite the rules. Financial privacy. Preserving rights to financial privacy and preventing identity theft are hot-button issues for consumers. So CU created a tailored Web site that allows consumers to contact their elected representatives directly on those topics. Californians have the toughest financial-privacy law in the U.S. thanks in part to CU’s West Coast Regional Office, which was the leading consumer force behind its enactment. In short, the law requires financial institutions to get consumers’ consent before sharing sensitive financial information with most third parties. Prescription drugs. As drug expenditures continued to climb at double-digit rates, fueling hikes in health-insurance premiums, CU worked on legislation to give consumers objective information about the comparative effectiveness of prescription drugs and thereby lessen reliance on misleading drug ads. Advocates also took on the skimpy prescription-drug benefits being considered in Medicare-reform legislation and spelled out the need to rein in prices. Drug effectiveness and pricing are now important components of the Medicare-reform debate. Hospital safety. Every year, some 88,000 people die from infections they contract in the hospital. CU advocates launched a campaign to educate and mobilize the public. They’re also working with lawmakers so that the public can investigate the infection rates and other quality measures at local hospitals. Ephedra. Reports in this magazine and advocacy work on the dangers of the nutritional supplement ephedra helped the passage of laws banning its sale in New York and in California, where at press time the bill awaited action by Gov. Gray Davis. CU continues to urge the Food and Drug Administration to ban ephedra sales nationwide. Car safety for kids. To reduce the number of child injuries and deaths caused by power windows, backover accidents, and other dangers to children in and around vehicles, CU advocates worked with Congress to see that the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration focuses on those problems and ways to prevent them. Energy labels. The Department of Energy has been underreporting energy use for soil-sensing dishwashers, our tests have shown. We successfully
pushed for changes to the ubiquitous yellow energy label on those appliances to reflect their true energy use, and also on
washing machines to reflect new testing procedures.
Then & now: Brisker brushing
Judging from patent records, designing toothbrushes is as big a pastime as building better mousetraps. Electrified brushes
certainly made things easier for consumers--if they survived their brushing regimen. Our 1962 tests included the plug-in Vibra-dent model (left), bearing the Underwriters Laboratories safety seal. Trouble was, if you dropped it in a basin of water, you could electrocute yourself retrieving it. Our tests, more stringent than UL’s, uncovered a “potentially lethal shock hazard,” prompting CU to notify the FDA and warn consumers. Many of today’s “power” brushes, with heads resembling sophisticated dental tools, run on disposable batteries; chances of
electrocution are nil.
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