U.S. and 14 Lenders Said to Be Near Deal of Foreclosure Claims

A $10 billion settlement to resolve claims of foreclosure abuses by 14 major lenders was expected to be announced as early as Monday, several people with knowledge of the discussions said on Sunday.

The settlement would come after weeks of negotiations between federal regulators and the banks, and covers abuses like flawed paperwork and botched loan modifications, said these people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the deal had not been made public.

An estimated $3.75 billion of the $10 billion would be distributed in cash relief to Americans who went through foreclosure in 2009 and 2010, these people said. An additional $6 billion would be directed toward homeowners in danger of losing their homes after falling behind on their monthly payments.

All 14 banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup, were expected to sign on.

The agreement would come almost a year after a sweeping deal in February between state attorneys general and five large mortgage lenders.

The settlement almost fell apart over the weekend. Some officials at the Federal Reserve threatened to scuttle the deal unless the banks agreed to pay an additional $300 million for their role in the 2008 financial crisis, which upended the housing market and led to millions of foreclosures.

The Fed officials argued for additional aid for homeowners ensnared in a flawed foreclosure process, according to several people briefed on the negotiations who spoke on condition of anonymity. The $300 million demand was to come on top of the $10 billion payout, but was met with resistance from the banks, especially because it was raised late in the day on Friday, according to these people.

The Federal Reserve officials backed down, allowing the $10 billion pact to move forward ahead of bank earnings releases this month, these people said.

During the last week, officials from the Federal Reserve met with community groups and consumer advocates to gather comments about a settlement. It was those talks that induced the Fed to forgo the request for additional money, according to three people familiar with the matter. The thinking, these people said, was that broad relief was better than a lengthy review process that had not yielded much relief.

Representatives from the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which led banking regulators in the negotiations, declined to provide further details on the settlement.

Still, some housing advocates said the settlement did not go far enough in providing relief. Bruce Marks, chief executive of the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, expressed cautious optimism about the deal, but added that the “devil is in the details.”

It is still unclear how the monetary relief will be distributed among homeowners, but one immediate result of the settlement is the end of a troubled review of millions of loan files.

As part of a consent order in April 2011, the comptroller’s office and the Federal Reserve established the Independent Foreclosure Review, which mandated that banks hire independent consultants to audit loan files and look for illegal fees, bungled loan modifications and instances where borrowers lost their homes even though they were current on their payments. Only 323,000 homeowners submitted claims for their files to be reviewed.

Within the comptroller’s office, senior officials raised concerns that the reviews had grown bloated and inefficient, especially after each loan took more than 20 hours to review, up from original estimates of eight hours a file.

The mounting costs of the reviews, up to $250 an hour, began to worry the banking regulators, according to several of the people with knowledge of the matter. So far, the foreclosure review program has cost the banks an estimated $1.5 billion, according to these people.

Banking regulators grew concerned that the reviews were not producing meaningful instances of banks wrongfully seizing the homes of borrowers who were current on their payments, according to these people.

Told last week of the plans to stop the foreclosure reviews, some consumer advocates expressed concern that the full extent of the damage to homeowners would never be known. Some of the advocates have questioned whether the banks were getting off too easily because they selected and paid the consultants charged with examining their loans.

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Tehran Is Choked by Annual Buildup of Air Pollution

TEHRAN — Already battered by international threats against their nation’s nuclear program, sanctions and a broken economy, Iranians living here in the capital are now trying to cope with what has become an annual pollution peril: a yellowish haze that engulfs Tehran this time of year.

For nearly a week, officials here and in other large cities have been calling on residents to remain indoors or avoid downtown areas, saying that with air pollution at such high levels, venturing outside could be tantamount to “suicide,” state radio reported Saturday.

On Sunday, government offices, schools, universities and banks reopened after the government had ordered them to shut down for five days to help ease the chronic pollution. Tehran’s normally bustling streets were largely deserted.

Residents who dare to go outside cover their mouths and noses with scarves or surgical masks, but their eyes tear up and their throats sting from the mist of pollutants, which a report by the municipality of Tehran says is made up of a mixture of particles containing lead, sulfur dioxins and benzene.

“It feels as if even God has turned against us,” Azadeh, a 32-year-old artist, said on a recent day as she looked out a window in her apartment that often offers a clear view of Tehran, a sprawling city that is home to millions. But on this day, Azadeh, who did not want her full name used, saw only the blurred outlines of high-rise buildings and the Milad communications tower in the distance. The setting sun was reduced to a yellowish coin by the thick blanket of smog.

The haze of pollution occurs every year when cold air and windless days trap fumes belched out by millions of cars and hundreds of old factories between the peaks of the majestic Alborz mountain range, which embraces Tehran like a crescent moon.

Iran is prominently represented in the World Health Organization’s 2011 report on air quality and health, with three of its provincial towns among the organization’s list of the world’s 10 most-polluted cities. According to the report, Tehran has roughly four times as many polluting particles per cubic meter as Los Angeles. Many cities known for their poor air quality, like Mexico City, Shanghai and Bangkok, are cleaner than Tehran.

But since 2010, when American sanctions on Iranian imports of refined gasoline began to bite, the situation has grown worse, according to the report by the municipality of Tehran.

Faced with possible fuel shortages, Iran surprised outsiders by quickly making up for the loss of imports by producing its own brew of gasoline. While the emergency fuel kept vehicles running, local experts warned that it was creating much more pollution.

A recently released report by Tehran’s department of air quality control contained blank spaces where there should have been information about levels of benzene and lead — components of gasoline — in the capital’s air. But the report did state that while Tehran experienced more than 300 “healthy days” in 2009, in 2011 there were fewer than 150.

Iran’s Health Ministry has reported a rise in respiratory and heart diseases, as well as an increase in a variety of cancers that it says are related to pollution.

The state newspaper Resalat on Saturday called the pollution a continuing crisis, and it urged the authorities to act. “Why is it that when the winds pick up, this problem is again quickly forgotten?” an editorial asked. Another newspaper, Donya-e-Eqtesad, which is critical of the government, pressed for an improvement in gasoline standards.

The pollution caused by the use of the emergency fuel concoction has been a taboo subject here, as officials try to portray each measure to counter the economic sanctions as a success that should not to be criticized by the local news media.

On state television, several officials have denied that the yellow haze has anything to do with the locally produced gasoline.

In an interview on Saturday, Ali Mohammad Sha’eri, the deputy director of Iran’s Environmental Protection Organization, strongly denied that the pollution was linked to gasoline. However, he said that only 20 percent of the emergency fuel was up to modern standards. “Hopefully in three months that level will be 50 percent,” he said.

Meanwhile, the government has imposed strict traffic regulations in Tehran, Isfahan and other major population centers. An odd-even traffic-control plan based on the last digit of vehicle license plates keeps about half of the approximately three and a half million cars in Tehran off the streets on a daily basis.

Other plans to combat the pollution have been less realistic, analysts say. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has long advocated a plan to move civil servants from Tehran to reduce overpopulation in the capital. In 2010, the governor of Tehran Province ordered crop-dusters to dump water on the smog in an effort to dissipate it. There have also been plans for placing air purifiers in the city, but experts say they will not work in open spaces.

For those living in Tehran and unable to leave town for a vacation home on the Caspian Sea, waiting for the winds to pick up seems to be the only option.

“My head hurts, and I’m constantly dead tired,” said Niloufar Mohammadi, a university student. “I try not to go out, but I can smell the pollution in my room as I am trying to study.”

Azadeh, the artist, said the pollution forced her to stay indoors, adding to her sense of isolation. Step by step her world was being curtailed, she said. The Western sanctions imposed on Iran make her feel like a pariah, she explained. The government’s mismanagement of the economy and the resulting inflation have left her with little purchasing power, she said; she has stopped shopping for everything but essential items. And last week, security officers removed her illegal satellite dish from her roof.

“The pollution is the last straw for me,” she said. “We should wait helpless for winds to pick up and clean the air before we can safely leave our houses. It shows we have lost all power to control our lives.”

Read More..

Tehran Is Choked by Annual Buildup of Air Pollution

TEHRAN — Already battered by international threats against their nation’s nuclear program, sanctions and a broken economy, Iranians living here in the capital are now trying to cope with what has become an annual pollution peril: a yellowish haze that engulfs Tehran this time of year.

For nearly a week, officials here and in other large cities have been calling on residents to remain indoors or avoid downtown areas, saying that with air pollution at such high levels, venturing outside could be tantamount to “suicide,” state radio reported Saturday.

On Sunday, government offices, schools, universities and banks reopened after the government had ordered them to shut down for five days to help ease the chronic pollution. Tehran’s normally bustling streets were largely deserted.

Residents who dare to go outside cover their mouths and noses with scarves or surgical masks, but their eyes tear up and their throats sting from the mist of pollutants, which a report by the municipality of Tehran says is made up of a mixture of particles containing lead, sulfur dioxins and benzene.

“It feels as if even God has turned against us,” Azadeh, a 32-year-old artist, said on a recent day as she looked out a window in her apartment that often offers a clear view of Tehran, a sprawling city that is home to millions. But on this day, Azadeh, who did not want her full name used, saw only the blurred outlines of high-rise buildings and the Milad communications tower in the distance. The setting sun was reduced to a yellowish coin by the thick blanket of smog.

The haze of pollution occurs every year when cold air and windless days trap fumes belched out by millions of cars and hundreds of old factories between the peaks of the majestic Alborz mountain range, which embraces Tehran like a crescent moon.

Iran is prominently represented in the World Health Organization’s 2011 report on air quality and health, with three of its provincial towns among the organization’s list of the world’s 10 most-polluted cities. According to the report, Tehran has roughly four times as many polluting particles per cubic meter as Los Angeles. Many cities known for their poor air quality, like Mexico City, Shanghai and Bangkok, are cleaner than Tehran.

But since 2010, when American sanctions on Iranian imports of refined gasoline began to bite, the situation has grown worse, according to the report by the municipality of Tehran.

Faced with possible fuel shortages, Iran surprised outsiders by quickly making up for the loss of imports by producing its own brew of gasoline. While the emergency fuel kept vehicles running, local experts warned that it was creating much more pollution.

A recently released report by Tehran’s department of air quality control contained blank spaces where there should have been information about levels of benzene and lead — components of gasoline — in the capital’s air. But the report did state that while Tehran experienced more than 300 “healthy days” in 2009, in 2011 there were fewer than 150.

Iran’s Health Ministry has reported a rise in respiratory and heart diseases, as well as an increase in a variety of cancers that it says are related to pollution.

The state newspaper Resalat on Saturday called the pollution a continuing crisis, and it urged the authorities to act. “Why is it that when the winds pick up, this problem is again quickly forgotten?” an editorial asked. Another newspaper, Donya-e-Eqtesad, which is critical of the government, pressed for an improvement in gasoline standards.

The pollution caused by the use of the emergency fuel concoction has been a taboo subject here, as officials try to portray each measure to counter the economic sanctions as a success that should not to be criticized by the local news media.

On state television, several officials have denied that the yellow haze has anything to do with the locally produced gasoline.

In an interview on Saturday, Ali Mohammad Sha’eri, the deputy director of Iran’s Environmental Protection Organization, strongly denied that the pollution was linked to gasoline. However, he said that only 20 percent of the emergency fuel was up to modern standards. “Hopefully in three months that level will be 50 percent,” he said.

Meanwhile, the government has imposed strict traffic regulations in Tehran, Isfahan and other major population centers. An odd-even traffic-control plan based on the last digit of vehicle license plates keeps about half of the approximately three and a half million cars in Tehran off the streets on a daily basis.

Other plans to combat the pollution have been less realistic, analysts say. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has long advocated a plan to move civil servants from Tehran to reduce overpopulation in the capital. In 2010, the governor of Tehran Province ordered crop-dusters to dump water on the smog in an effort to dissipate it. There have also been plans for placing air purifiers in the city, but experts say they will not work in open spaces.

For those living in Tehran and unable to leave town for a vacation home on the Caspian Sea, waiting for the winds to pick up seems to be the only option.

“My head hurts, and I’m constantly dead tired,” said Niloufar Mohammadi, a university student. “I try not to go out, but I can smell the pollution in my room as I am trying to study.”

Azadeh, the artist, said the pollution forced her to stay indoors, adding to her sense of isolation. Step by step her world was being curtailed, she said. The Western sanctions imposed on Iran make her feel like a pariah, she explained. The government’s mismanagement of the economy and the resulting inflation have left her with little purchasing power, she said; she has stopped shopping for everything but essential items. And last week, security officers removed her illegal satellite dish from her roof.

“The pollution is the last straw for me,” she said. “We should wait helpless for winds to pick up and clean the air before we can safely leave our houses. It shows we have lost all power to control our lives.”

Read More..

Virtual U.: Massive Open Online Courses Prove Popular, if Not Lucrative Yet

Online Learning, En Masse:
More top colleges are offering free massive open online courses, but companies and universities still need to figure out a way to monetize this tool for democratizing higher education.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — In August, four months after Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng started the online education company Coursera, its free college courses had drawn in a million users, a faster launching than either Facebook or Twitter.

The co-founders, computer science professors at Stanford University, watched with amazement as enrollment passed two million last month, with 70,000 new students a week signing up for over 200 courses, including Human-Computer Interaction, Songwriting and Gamification, taught by faculty members at the company’s partners, 33 elite universities.

In less than a year, Coursera has attracted $22 million in venture capital and has created so much buzz that some universities sound a bit defensive about not leaping onto the bandwagon.

Other approaches to online courses are emerging as well. Universities nationwide are increasing their online offerings, hoping to attract students around the world. New ventures like Udemy help individual professors put their courses online. Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have each provided $30 million to create edX. Another Stanford spinoff, Udacity, has attracted more than a million students to its menu of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, along with $15 million in financing.

All of this could well add up to the future of higher education — if anyone can figure out how to make money.

Coursera has grown at warp speed to emerge as the current leader of the pack, striving to support its business by creating revenue streams through licensing, certification fees and recruitment data provided to employers, among other efforts. But there is no guarantee that it will keep its position in the exploding education technology marketplace.

“No one’s got the model that’s going to work yet,” said James Grimmelmann, a New York Law School professor who specializes in computer and Internet law. “I expect all the current ventures to fail, because the expectations are too high. People think something will catch on like wildfire. But more likely, it’s maybe a decade later that somebody figures out how to do it and make money.”

For their part, Ms. Koller and Mr. Ng proclaim a desire to keep courses freely available to poor students worldwide. Education, they have said repeatedly, should be a right, not a privilege. And even their venture backers say profits can wait.

“Monetization is not the most important objective for this business at this point,” said Scott Sandell, a Coursera financier who is a general partner at New Enterprise Associates. “What is important is that Coursera is rapidly accumulating a body of high-quality content that could be very attractive to universities that want to license it for their own use. We invest with a very long mind-set, and the gestation period of the very best companies is at least 10 years.”

But with the first trickles of revenue now coming in, Coursera’s university partners expect to see some revenue sooner.

“We’ll make money when Coursera makes money,” said Peter Lange, the provost of Duke University, one of Coursera’s partners. “I don’t think it will be too long down the road. We don’t want to make the mistake the newspaper industry did, of giving our product away free online for too long.”

Right now, the most promising source of revenue for Coursera is the payment of licensing fees from other educational institutions that want to use the Coursera classes, either as a ready-made “course in a box” or as video lectures students can watch before going to class to work with a faculty member.

Ms. Koller has plenty of other ideas, as well. She is planning to charge $20, or maybe $50, for certificates of completion. And her company, like Udacity, has begun to charge corporate employers, including Facebook and Twitter, for access to high-performing students, starting with those studying software engineering.

This fall, Ms. Koller was excited about news she was about to announce: Antioch University’s Los Angeles campus had agreed to offer its students credit for successfully completing two Coursera courses, Modern and Contemporary American Poetry and Greek and Roman Mythology, both taught by professors from the University of Pennsylvania. Antioch would be the first college to pay a licensing fee — Ms. Koller would not say how much — to offer the courses to its students at a tuition lower than any four-year public campus in the state.

“We think this model will spread, helping academic institutions offer their students a better education at a lower price,” she said.

Read More..

Pakistani Soldier Killed in Shooting in Kashmir

Mukesh Gupta/Reuters

Kashmir remains a point of confrontation between India and Pakistan.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistani and Indian troops exchanged gunfire across the disputed Kashmir border early Sunday, leaving one Pakistani soldier dead in a relatively rare fatal confrontation between the two neighbors.

As usual, the rival armies, which have been engaged in a face-off in Kashmir for decades, disagreed about who started the shooting or what happened next.

Pakistan said Indian troops crossed the disputed boundary, known as the Line of Control, into Pakistani-controlled territory, where they attacked a remote outpost and wounded two soldiers, one of whom later died.

“Our army troops effectively responded and repulsed the attack successfully,” said a Pakistani military spokesman, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Indian Army troops left behind a gun and a dagger.”

But the Indian military said that its troops had not crossed into Pakistani territory and that it was only responding to an unprovoked Pakistani shelling across the Line of Control that destroyed a civilian house.

“None of our troops crossed the Line of Control,” Col. Jagadish Dahiya, an Indian Army spokesman, told Reuters. “We have no casualties or injuries.”

The clash was an unusual breach of an almost decade-long cease-fire that has largely held between the two rivals, whose leaders have concentrated on building economic and diplomatic ties.

In the last major shooting, in September 2011, Pakistan claimed to have lost three soldiers while India said one of its officers was killed. There have been other, smaller, clashes in recent months.

But in the last year, encouraging signs have emerged that relations are thawing.

The two countries have eased travel restrictions for Kashmiris living on both sides of the de facto border, and introduced encouraging economic initiatives intended to foster bilateral trade.

It was unclear whether Sunday’s clash would affect any of that. The Pakistani cricket team is visiting India, and on Sunday, a match was played between the two sides in New Delhi, the Indian capital.

Still, military and ideological hard-liners in both countries consider the bitter conflict over Kashmir, which erupted just after independence in 1947, as the core issue that needs to be resolved. Pakistan and India, both of which claim the mountainous territory in its entirety, have fought two wars over the region.

Pakistan said that Sunday’s clash occurred at a remote border post in the Bagh district, more than 50 miles east of the capital, Islamabad.

One encouraging sign is that the recent warming of relations could not have taken place without approval from Pakistan’s generals, who at any rate are increasingly absorbed by the fight against Islamist militants along their western border with Afghanistan.

That fight has been complicated by tense relations with the United States. On Sunday the Central Intelligence Agency continued to press its drone strike campaign in Waziristan, with three missile attacks against suspected militant bases that killed at least 12 people, according to Pakistani intelligence officials.

In one strike, in South Waziristan, a remotely piloted American aircraft fired 10 missiles into a suspected Pakistani Taliban training camp, one intelligence official said, speaking by phone on the condition of anonymity.

A senior Taliban militant, speaking by phone from Waziristan on the condition of anonymity, confirmed the strike. Three senior Taliban commanders were believed to have died, he said, including one who had masterminded a jailbreak in nearby Bannu last year that allowed 390 inmates to escape.

Another commander who is believed to have died, Wali Muhammad, who is also known as Tuffani Mehsud, was considered to be the leader of the Pakistani Taliban’s suicide bomber squad.

“It is a major blow to our organization,” the Taliban militant said.

Salman Masood and Ihsanullah Tipu Mehsud contributed reporting.

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Despite New Health Law, Some See Sharp Rise in Premiums

Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers.

Bob Chamberlin/Los Angeles Times

Dave Jones, the California insurance commissioner, said some insurance companies could raise rates as much as they did before the law was enacted.

Particularly vulnerable to the high rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.

In California, Aetna is proposing rate increases of as much as 22 percent, Anthem Blue Cross 26 percent and Blue Shield of California 20 percent for some of those policy holders, according to the insurers’ filings with the state for 2013. These rate requests are all the more striking after a 39 percent rise sought by Anthem Blue Cross in 2010 helped give impetus to the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, which was passed the same year and will not be fully in effect until 2014.

 In other states, like Florida and Ohio, insurers have been able to raise rates by at least 20 percent for some policy holders. The rate increases can amount to several hundred dollars a month.

The proposed increases compare with about 4 percent for families with employer-based policies.

Under the health care law, regulators are now required to review any request for a rate increase of 10 percent or more; the requests are posted on a federal Web site, healthcare.gov, along with regulators’ evaluations.

The review process not only reveals the sharp disparity in the rates themselves, it also demonstrates the striking difference between places like New York, one of the 37 states where legislatures have given regulators some authority to deny or roll back rates deemed excessive, and California, which is among the states that do not have that ability.

New York, for example, recently used its sweeping powers to hold rate increases for 2013 in the individual and small group markets to under 10 percent. California can review rate requests for technical errors but cannot deny rate increases.

The double-digit requests in some states are being made despite evidence that overall health care costs appear to have slowed in recent years, increasing in the single digits annually as many people put off treatment because of the weak economy. PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that costs may increase just 7.5 percent next year, well below the rate increases being sought by some insurers. But the companies counter that medical costs for some policy holders are rising much faster than the average, suggesting they are in a sicker population. Federal regulators contend that premiums would be higher still without the law, which also sets limits on profits and administrative costs and provides for rebates if insurers exceed those limits.

Critics, like Dave Jones, the California insurance commissioner and one of two health plan regulators in that state, said that without a federal provision giving all regulators the ability to deny excessive rate increases, some insurance companies can raise rates as much as they did before the law was enacted.

“This is business as usual,” Mr. Jones said. “It’s a huge loophole in the Affordable Care Act,” he said.

While Mr. Jones has not yet weighed in on the insurers’ most recent requests, he is pushing for a state law that will give him that authority. Without legislative action, the state can only question the basis for the high rates, sometimes resulting in the insurer withdrawing or modifying the proposed rate increase.

The California insurers say they have no choice but to raise premiums if their underlying medical costs have increased. “We need these rates to even come reasonably close to covering the expenses of this population,” said Tom Epstein, a spokesman for Blue Shield of California. The insurer is requesting a range of increases, which average about 12 percent for 2013.

Although rates paid by employers are more closely tracked than rates for individuals and small businesses, policy experts say the law has probably kept at least some rates lower than they otherwise would have been.

“There’s no question that review of rates makes a difference, that it results in lower rates paid by consumers and small businesses,” said Larry Levitt, an executive at the Kaiser Family Foundation, which estimated in an October report that rate review was responsible for lowering premiums for one out of every five filings.

Federal officials say the law has resulted in significant savings. “The health care law includes new tools to hold insurers accountable for premium hikes and give rebates to consumers,” said Brian Cook, a spokesman for Medicare, which is helping to oversee the insurance reforms.

“Insurers have already paid $1.1 billion in rebates, and rate review programs have helped save consumers an additional $1 billion in lower premiums,” he said. If insurers collect premiums and do not spend at least 80 cents out of every dollar on care for their customers, the law requires them to refund the excess.

As a result of the review process, federal officials say, rates were reduced, on average, by nearly three percentage points, according to a report issued last September.

Read More..

Despite New Health Law, Some See Sharp Rise in Premiums

Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers.

Bob Chamberlin/Los Angeles Times

Dave Jones, the California insurance commissioner, said some insurance companies could raise rates as much as they did before the law was enacted.

Particularly vulnerable to the high rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.

In California, Aetna is proposing rate increases of as much as 22 percent, Anthem Blue Cross 26 percent and Blue Shield of California 20 percent for some of those policy holders, according to the insurers’ filings with the state for 2013. These rate requests are all the more striking after a 39 percent rise sought by Anthem Blue Cross in 2010 helped give impetus to the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, which was passed the same year and will not be fully in effect until 2014.

 In other states, like Florida and Ohio, insurers have been able to raise rates by at least 20 percent for some policy holders. The rate increases can amount to several hundred dollars a month.

The proposed increases compare with about 4 percent for families with employer-based policies.

Under the health care law, regulators are now required to review any request for a rate increase of 10 percent or more; the requests are posted on a federal Web site, healthcare.gov, along with regulators’ evaluations.

The review process not only reveals the sharp disparity in the rates themselves, it also demonstrates the striking difference between places like New York, one of the 37 states where legislatures have given regulators some authority to deny or roll back rates deemed excessive, and California, which is among the states that do not have that ability.

New York, for example, recently used its sweeping powers to hold rate increases for 2013 in the individual and small group markets to under 10 percent. California can review rate requests for technical errors but cannot deny rate increases.

The double-digit requests in some states are being made despite evidence that overall health care costs appear to have slowed in recent years, increasing in the single digits annually as many people put off treatment because of the weak economy. PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that costs may increase just 7.5 percent next year, well below the rate increases being sought by some insurers. But the companies counter that medical costs for some policy holders are rising much faster than the average, suggesting they are in a sicker population. Federal regulators contend that premiums would be higher still without the law, which also sets limits on profits and administrative costs and provides for rebates if insurers exceed those limits.

Critics, like Dave Jones, the California insurance commissioner and one of two health plan regulators in that state, said that without a federal provision giving all regulators the ability to deny excessive rate increases, some insurance companies can raise rates as much as they did before the law was enacted.

“This is business as usual,” Mr. Jones said. “It’s a huge loophole in the Affordable Care Act,” he said.

While Mr. Jones has not yet weighed in on the insurers’ most recent requests, he is pushing for a state law that will give him that authority. Without legislative action, the state can only question the basis for the high rates, sometimes resulting in the insurer withdrawing or modifying the proposed rate increase.

The California insurers say they have no choice but to raise premiums if their underlying medical costs have increased. “We need these rates to even come reasonably close to covering the expenses of this population,” said Tom Epstein, a spokesman for Blue Shield of California. The insurer is requesting a range of increases, which average about 12 percent for 2013.

Although rates paid by employers are more closely tracked than rates for individuals and small businesses, policy experts say the law has probably kept at least some rates lower than they otherwise would have been.

“There’s no question that review of rates makes a difference, that it results in lower rates paid by consumers and small businesses,” said Larry Levitt, an executive at the Kaiser Family Foundation, which estimated in an October report that rate review was responsible for lowering premiums for one out of every five filings.

Federal officials say the law has resulted in significant savings. “The health care law includes new tools to hold insurers accountable for premium hikes and give rebates to consumers,” said Brian Cook, a spokesman for Medicare, which is helping to oversee the insurance reforms.

“Insurers have already paid $1.1 billion in rebates, and rate review programs have helped save consumers an additional $1 billion in lower premiums,” he said. If insurers collect premiums and do not spend at least 80 cents out of every dollar on care for their customers, the law requires them to refund the excess.

As a result of the review process, federal officials say, rates were reduced, on average, by nearly three percentage points, according to a report issued last September.

Read More..

Despite New Health Law, Some See Sharp Rise in Premiums

Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers.

Bob Chamberlin/Los Angeles Times

Dave Jones, the California insurance commissioner, said some insurance companies could raise rates as much as they did before the law was enacted.

Particularly vulnerable to the high rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.

In California, Aetna is proposing rate increases of as much as 22 percent, Anthem Blue Cross 26 percent and Blue Shield of California 20 percent for some of those policy holders, according to the insurers’ filings with the state for 2013. These rate requests are all the more striking after a 39 percent rise sought by Anthem Blue Cross in 2010 helped give impetus to the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, which was passed the same year and will not be fully in effect until 2014.

 In other states, like Florida and Ohio, insurers have been able to raise rates by at least 20 percent for some policy holders. The rate increases can amount to several hundred dollars a month.

The proposed increases compare with about 4 percent for families with employer-based policies.

Under the health care law, regulators are now required to review any request for a rate increase of 10 percent or more; the requests are posted on a federal Web site, healthcare.gov, along with regulators’ evaluations.

The review process not only reveals the sharp disparity in the rates themselves, it also demonstrates the striking difference between places like New York, one of the 37 states where legislatures have given regulators some authority to deny or roll back rates deemed excessive, and California, which is among the states that do not have that ability.

New York, for example, recently used its sweeping powers to hold rate increases for 2013 in the individual and small group markets to under 10 percent. California can review rate requests for technical errors but cannot deny rate increases.

The double-digit requests in some states are being made despite evidence that overall health care costs appear to have slowed in recent years, increasing in the single digits annually as many people put off treatment because of the weak economy. PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that costs may increase just 7.5 percent next year, well below the rate increases being sought by some insurers. But the companies counter that medical costs for some policy holders are rising much faster than the average, suggesting they are in a sicker population. Federal regulators contend that premiums would be higher still without the law, which also sets limits on profits and administrative costs and provides for rebates if insurers exceed those limits.

Critics, like Dave Jones, the California insurance commissioner and one of two health plan regulators in that state, said that without a federal provision giving all regulators the ability to deny excessive rate increases, some insurance companies can raise rates as much as they did before the law was enacted.

“This is business as usual,” Mr. Jones said. “It’s a huge loophole in the Affordable Care Act,” he said.

While Mr. Jones has not yet weighed in on the insurers’ most recent requests, he is pushing for a state law that will give him that authority. Without legislative action, the state can only question the basis for the high rates, sometimes resulting in the insurer withdrawing or modifying the proposed rate increase.

The California insurers say they have no choice but to raise premiums if their underlying medical costs have increased. “We need these rates to even come reasonably close to covering the expenses of this population,” said Tom Epstein, a spokesman for Blue Shield of California. The insurer is requesting a range of increases, which average about 12 percent for 2013.

Although rates paid by employers are more closely tracked than rates for individuals and small businesses, policy experts say the law has probably kept at least some rates lower than they otherwise would have been.

“There’s no question that review of rates makes a difference, that it results in lower rates paid by consumers and small businesses,” said Larry Levitt, an executive at the Kaiser Family Foundation, which estimated in an October report that rate review was responsible for lowering premiums for one out of every five filings.

Federal officials say the law has resulted in significant savings. “The health care law includes new tools to hold insurers accountable for premium hikes and give rebates to consumers,” said Brian Cook, a spokesman for Medicare, which is helping to oversee the insurance reforms.

“Insurers have already paid $1.1 billion in rebates, and rate review programs have helped save consumers an additional $1 billion in lower premiums,” he said. If insurers collect premiums and do not spend at least 80 cents out of every dollar on care for their customers, the law requires them to refund the excess.

As a result of the review process, federal officials say, rates were reduced, on average, by nearly three percentage points, according to a report issued last September.

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Michael Cronan, Who Gave TiVo and Kindle Their Names, Dies at 61

Michael Cronan, a San Francisco-based graphic designer and marketing executive who placed his stamp on popular culture when he created the brand names TiVo and Kindle, died on Tuesday in Berkeley, Calif. He was 61.

The cause was colon cancer, said his wife, Karin Hibma, with whom he founded the marketing firm Cronan in the early 1980s.

Mr. Cronan, who studied art in college, had many corporations and cultural institutions as clients, but he was most remembered for the pair of brand names he came up with a decade apart.

In the spring of 1997, he was asked to forge a name and an identity for a new device, a digital video recorder developed by a company called Teleworld that offered more sophisticated television recording choices than the videocassette recorder.

“We reviewed probably 1,600-plus name alternatives, seriously considered over 800 names and presented over 100 strong candidates to the team,” Mr. Cronan told Matt Haughey for his blog PVR (the letters stand for personal video recorder) in 2005.

“We spent the early meetings trying to place a cultural context on the product,” he said. Among the possibilities were Bongo and Lasso, which never got far.

Believing that “we were naming the next TV,” Mr. Cronan recalled, “I thought it should be as close as possible to what people would find familiar, so it must contain T and V.”

“I started looking at letter combinations,” he added, “and pretty quickly settled on TiVo.” (The “Vo” portion, he said, had a connection to the Latin and Italian words for vocal sound and voice.) Then came the search for a mascot that Mr. Cronan hoped “would become as recognizable as the mouse ears are to Disney.” He created a TV-shaped smiley character with the name TiVo inscribed on its face, rabbit ears suggesting an early TV set and large, splayed feet. Teleworld changed its name to TiVo Inc.

When Amazon prepared to introduce its first electronic reader in 2007, it turned to Mr. Cronan, who envisioned imagery reflecting the reading experience as an embryonic but rising technology.

Ms. Hibma said in an interview on Friday that in pondering a brand name, Mr. Cronan “wanted to create something small, humble, with no braggadocio,” while choosing an image that “was about starting something, giving birth to something.” He found the name, she said, by likening use of the new e-reader to “starting a fire.”

Michael Patrick Cronan was born on June 9, 1951, in San Francisco. He studied painting at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts), where he later taught, and received a degree in art from California State University, Sacramento. He was a founder and past president of the San Francisco branch of AIGA, the professional association for design.

Mr. Cronan and his wife expanded their focus in 1992 to create the Walking Man clothing collection, featuring loose-knit tops and pants. Mr. Cronan also designed a pair of 1999 postage stamps, one commemorating the 50th anniversary of NATO and the other promoting prostate cancer awareness, and painted portraits and watercolors.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Cronan is survived by his sons, Shawn HibmaCronan and Nick Cronan; a brother, Christopher; a sister, Patricia Cronan; and a granddaughter.

For all his devotion to marketing and branding, Mr. Cronan felt that sometimes the demands of commerce went too far, as in the often-changing corporate names attached to sports stadiums and concert halls.

“There was a time in American life where going to a sporting event or a concert was sort of magical, because a lot of these places had these fun names,” he told The Denver Post in 2010. “But these days, with the amount of people craving advertising exposure, the sponsors have found a way to sell everything. They’re selling our nostalgia, and it’s sad.”

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Memo From London: Argentina’s Call for Return of Falkland Islands Causes a Stir

LONDON — They have barely 3,000 inhabitants and far more sheep than people. They are more than 8,700 miles from London. For much of the year, they are bitterly cold and wind-swept, with only open sea and ice between them and Antarctica. President Ronald Reagan, who tussled with Margaret Thatcher over them as he rarely did on any other issue that engaged the two leaders, described them once as “that little ice-cold bunch of land down there.”

But the Falkland Islands, the focus of a short war between Britain and Argentina in 1982, have been in the headlines again recently.

Politicians, newspapers and military leaders in both countries have been back at the barricades making the old arguments about who is the islands’ rightful owner. Their arguments suggest what has long been evident: nothing lasting was settled by the conflict that killed 255 British and 649 Argentine soldiers, sailors and airmen, as well as 3 civilians on the islands.

The British newspaper The Guardian heralded the latest outburst in an editorial on Friday that struck an exhausted note. “Here we go again,” it said, tacitly acknowledging that the paper has been stuck in something of a rut of its own on the issue for years in its calls for a negotiated settlement.

As it was in 1982, few British politicians, and only a minority of mostly left-of-center opinion in Britain, have been ready to deviate from the unyielding stance that Mrs. Thatcher adopted. She sent a British naval task force to recapture the islands after the Argentine military dictatorship of Leopoldo Galtieri dispatched troops to overrun the meager British garrison there.

To many on the British left, there is little to be served by rehashing the old arguments that were set off when President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina wrote an open letter to Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain on Thursday. It was published as an advertisement in The Guardian and another left-of-center British daily, The Independent.

The letter appeared on the 180th anniversary of Jan. 3, 1833, when an armed clash between the two nations took place on the islands. The episode has been settled on by Argentina as a watershed moment in a convoluted colonial story that goes back to the 16th century and involves competing claims to sovereignty by Britain, France, Portugal and Spain, which was the colonial power in Argentina until the country gained independence in 1816. In the statement that ran in the British papers, Mrs. Kirchner asserted that “Argentina was forcibly stripped of the Malvinas Islands” — Argentina’s name for the territory — in the murky 1833 episode. The clash involved a British sloop, an outgunned Argentine vessel and an Argentine commander’s submission to a British demand that he remove the remnants of a mutinous Argentine garrison from the islands.

Britain has always rebutted Argentine claims that the people who were expelled included Argentine civilians, and it contends that British sovereignty was established by a much earlier settlement, dating to the mid-18th century.

The Guardian, in its editorial, dismissed this as political window dressing, ultimately irrelevant to the present dispute. Mrs. Kirchner’s letter, it said, had more to do with a populist bid to revive her slumping popularity in Argentina than “anything a British brig-sloop did 180 years ago.” The newspaper added, “Any objective reader of the history of these islands would more likely conclude that this history is mixed, to say the least, and that the rival sovereignty claims are finely balanced.” The editorial urged the two countries to grapple with the issue diplomatically and to aim, initially, for an agreement on sharing in the bounty of fisheries and in recently discovered offshore oil reserves that some economists believe could turn into a 21st-century bonanza for the islands.

Mr. Cameron, though, is having none of it. Within hours of Mrs. Kirchner’s statement, he went before television cameras, saying that the future of the islands would be determined by the Falkland Islanders and that they would make their feelings known in a referendum to be held in March on the islands’ political status.

That was the expedient Britain adopted last year when Mrs. Kirchner campaigned in Argentina, and at the United Nations in New York, for a reopening of the sovereignty issue on the 30th anniversary of the 1982 war.

“As long as they choose to stay with the United Kingdom, they have my 100 percent backing,” Mr. Cameron said.

For the British leader, it is a safe bet. About 70 percent of the islanders are of British descent, and visitors there say there is no more than a scattering of support for an Argentine takeover. Tying the Falklands’ future to the islanders’ choice leaves Britain essentially where it was under Mrs. Thatcher. She remains a revered figure for Mr. Cameron, not only for her conservative stewardship at 10 Downing Street but also for her success in turning the Falklands issue into her second general-election victory, in 1983. It is a precedent unlikely to be lost on the current prime minister as he contemplates the general election he must face in 2015.

If there is a worry for Mr. Cameron, it lies in the possibility that Argentina, with popular passions heightened by Mrs. Kirchner, may make another attempt to seize the islands by force. British military commanders say they consider that highly unlikely, since Argentina’s armed forces have been barely modernized since the military junta there collapsed in the wake of the 1982 conflict, and they lack the power they had then to project air and naval power.

British forces on the islands have been expensively upgraded, with 800 troops, a new military airfield equipped to take heavy transport jets, a squadron of Typhoon fighter-bombers and, at times of tension, a nuclear attack submarine prowling the South Atlantic.

But Britain miscalculated before, in 1982, when Mrs. Thatcher’s government brushed aside diplomatic warnings of an invasion.

“I never, never expected the Argentines to invade the Falklands head-on,” she told an inquiry after the war, according to secret cabinet papers from the period that were released in late December. “It was such a stupid thing to do, as events happened, such a stupid thing even to contemplate doing.”

The papers included another kind of warning. Little noticed among the newly published documents was the last dispatch of Britain’s ambassador to Argentina when the Falklands invasion took place.

The envoy, Anthony Williams, who was never assigned as an ambassador again, argued eloquently that Britain had been wrong to regard the Argentine invasion as “a simple act of brigandage.” He said that although the country had “its share of vandals, hooligans and roughs,” it also had a case that the ambassador suggested could be compared to the seizure of the Suez Canal from its British and French owners in 1956 by President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt.

“If our rightness is not so absolute as it now seems to us, no more is Argentine wrongness,” he said.

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