Foreclosures And Other Blues

Last night’s ABC Nightly News continued to k’vel over the rising stock market, and then offered three stories that caught my attention. (Today the DOW dropped five points below ten thousand as investors took some profits. But it still seems just slightly out of touch with reality.)
Home foreclosures are climbing and will likely continue to climb next year. It’s no longer just subprime mortgages that are sinking. By now enough people have been out of work long enough that regular, fixed-rate mortgages are going into default. There are huge numbers of homes on the block all over the country. The commentator mentioned that in the few seconds she had given her report, fourteen homes had been reclaimed by the lender.
Bad enough to be foreclosed—but what happens if your new house falls apart all around you? It seems that during the last stages of the housing boom, when builders were frantically busy and materials were in short supply, a lot of stuff sneaked in from China.
Drywall is part of that stuff. Some Chinese drywall gives off such toxic fumes that they rot the electric wires running through the walls. This is leading to an understandable concern among the owners of at least 100,000 new houses in forty states—what are the fumes doing to US?
Imagine the repair. You strip all the drywall off the walls and ceilings of every room in your home . Then think of replacing most of the wiring and possibly some of the water and drain pipes. (How long do you store your furniture? Where do you live? Do the carpets and cabinets survive? How about ceiling light fixtures?)
This can cost a good part of the price of an entire new home. Well, we’ll go to the insurance company. Not if they find out about your wallboard first! According to ABC sensible insurance companies are cancelling policies with lightning speed.
(This isn’t as villainous as we might think. You have to remember, ALL insurance is a bet—just like Vegas. You’re betting you’ll get lucky and die or have a major auto accident and collect a windfall. They’re betting you’ll live and avoid the accident. NOBODY bets on a horse with a broken leg. As soon as you learn the horse is lame—or the wallboard potentially lethal—you leave the betting window as rapidly as you can. You don’t insure a house that’s on fire.)
Thank you, China—for rushing to meet our need, once again, when we were hard pressed to produce enough of our own. What recourse do we have? Not a lot—they pretty much hold the mortgage on the United States right now. Heaven help us if they start dumping bonds.
Oh, and there was the story on women’s health insurance. It seems that women pay as much as 48% more in premiums because they are female. This comes from testimony before Congress this week. If a woman has had a Caesarian section, then the fun starts.
In one instance, in case of another pregnancy, a woman’s co-pay was raised to $5,000 before she could see a dime of insurance money. Other women were denied coverage of any kind. Yet another woman was told by a company that if she sterilized herself they would cover her.
(These are the wonderful folk that the Right—all too often the Christian Right—feels we should trust with our health care rather than the government. One thing about government care—to a fault, it does not have a profit motive involved in its decisions.)
Be joyful. The stock market is roaring its way to recovery. Investors—who have something left to invest after last year—are looking very, very happy. Compensation for bankers looks like it will be in the billions and billions this year.
What’s a few foreclosures, a lot of bad wallboard and some startling health insurance caveats in the face of so much happiness?