The McDonald's of today could learn a lot from the McDonald's of yesterday about how to run a burger joint.
Check out this 1950s-era McDonald's menu board:
There were just nine items! Today the multibillion-dollar chain offers more than 100 items, from Big Macs to McWraps to berry smoothies and several salads. The company has been publicly fretting about its overwhelming menu and getting blown away by competitors like Shake Shack and Five Guys, which offer simple menus with the modern-day twist of customization.
At Five Guys, for example, diners choose from just two burger sizes and a few burger types (plain, cheese, bacon, and bacon and cheese). The variety comes in because people can add as many other toppings as they want from a list of 15 that includes everything from grilled onions to jalapeño peppers.
By contrast, McDonald’s now offers a long list of its own burger-topping combos, including classics like the Big Mac and variations like the grilled-onion cheddar burger, the bacon clubhouse burger and the BBQ ranch burger.
“When you have that kind of choice, execution becomes much more complicated and complex,” said Tom Frank, a restaurant industry consultant who was on the founding team of Chinese restaurant chain P.F. Chang’s. In 2013, McDonald’s clocked its slowest average drive-thru time since 1998, according to QSR Magazine, a fast-food industry trade publication.
Business analysts agree that the long menu (and changing American taste buds) is killing sales. Monthly sales at U.S. McDonald's restaurants open more than a year have been flat or declining for the past 13 months.
"We are focused on continuing to evolve to meet the changing needs of our customers today and in the future," a McDonald's spokeswoman told HuffPost in an email.
McDonald’s has acknowledged its menu troubles, announcing a broad turnaround plan earlier this month that includes slashing eight menu items. The company is currently testing a slimmed-down version of its menu in some locations, offering just one quarter-pounder with cheese instead of four and one kind of Snack Wrap instead of three.
"Our intent is to have a cleaner menu board that is easier for customers to absorb," according to a company statement on the menu changes.
The fast-food chain is also going to try its hand at Five Guys-style customization, giving diners the chance to choose from toppings like guacamole, creamy garlic sauce and and pepper jack cheese to create their own custom burgers at 2,000 locations.
“If you want to stay relevant, you almost have to move in this direction,” said Darren Tristano, executive vice president at Technomic, a food research firm.
Customization comes with some big pitfalls, though. When diners design their own meals, they’re more likely to focus on the quality of each ingredient, said Gregg Rapp, a menu engineer who has worked with eateries like Taco Bell and California Pizza Kitchen. For McDonald’s, which is already battling a reputation that it serves pink slime, pushing customers to zero in on the freshness and quality of each ingredient may end up hurting the chain. Right now, McDonald's is waging a huge public relations effort to rebuild its reputation for fresh food:
A video about the making of McDonald's chicken nuggets. It's part of the chain's transparency campaign, "Our Food. Your Questions."
Meanwhile, that menu isn't really getting much smaller. Removing just eight items is hardly a return to McDonald's roots. Take a look at a 2007 drive-thru menu, when the chain offered fewer items than it does today:
Fast-food diners are easily overwhelmed by a menu board cluttered with options, said Rapp. That anxiety only increases if there’s a long line behind them. By contrast, a limited menu makes decisions much easier, Rapp said, and people tend to be more satisfied with their choices when choosing is easy.
Another benefit of a small menu is that it may encourage people to order more expensive items. Flummoxed diners typically default to the simplest order or whatever they had the last time they walked in, and that’s rarely a specialty item, Rapp said.
“You don’t want a customer to be confused as they’re coming through the drive-thru, especially if you’re advertising a premium-based sandwich,” McDonald’s CEO Don Thompson said in discussing the plan to pare down the menu during an investor briefing earlier this month. Customers won't buy the item if they're confused, he said.
McDonald's would be better served by focusing on what originally made the chain successful -- consistent burgers and fries delivered quickly -- instead of trying to fight off its many competitors by adopting elements from all of them, according to Aaron Allen, founder of the restaurant consultancy firm Aaron Allen & Associates. The Golden Arches vision for the future, he said, "smells more of desperation than of inspiration."
American Apparel's ousted chief executive is low on funds, following a six-month battle to regain control of the clothing company he founded.
Dov Charney, who was suspended as CEO in June and officially terminated last week, is down to his last $100,000 and is living in New York City at a friend’s home, Bloomberg anchor Trish Regan said he told her in an off-air chat last week.
A person with knowledge of Charney’s finances told The Huffington Post that he didn't squander money on extravagances like helicopters or private jets. Rather, Charney has been paying back debts to family members who once invested in American Apparel, the person said.
As CEO of American Apparel, Charney's base salary was $832,000 last year, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and he’s still the company’s largest shareholder. However, Charney doesn’t have control of his 43 percent stake because of an agreement with hedge fund Standard General, which lent him the money to buy much of the shares earlier this year. Charney needs to get its approval to do virtually anything with his stake, making the fund a major power broker within American Apparel.
Charney blamed Standard General for his woes, according to Bloomberg. He turned to the firm for help when he was ousted as CEO by the board of directors.
“I gave them my entire life’s work and they agreed to put me back in,” he told Bloomberg. “But instead they used this investigation to fire me. They betrayed me. I gave them my heart.”
Standard General disagrees.
“We supported the independent, third-party and very thorough investigation into the allegations against Mr. Charney, and respect the Board of Directors’ decision to terminate him based on the results of that investigation,” a spokesperson for Standard General said in a statement.
Standard General is run by Soo Kim, who co-founded the firm in 2007 and landed on Institutional Investor’s list of “Hedge Fund Rising Stars” in 2013. It’s been in the news of late because of its involvement in RadioShack, the ailing electronics retailer teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.
Charney was fired after a third-party investigation into accusations from the company's board that he sexually harassed employees, misused company funds and violated his fiduciary duty. He has maintained his innocence.
Last week, American Apparel announced that Paula Schneider, a veteran of Warnaco and BCBG Max Azria, is taking over as CEO, replacing interim chief Scott Brubaker. American Apparel declined to comment on Charney's situation.
Despite everything that’s happened, Charney plans to keep fighting, and is “suing everyone” with what little funds he has left, according to the Bloomberg report.
“I gave them my shares so that I could come back and run this company,” he told Bloomberg. “I bet the farm … They robbed me.”
While Barbie was busy becoming a tech entrepreneur, the company that makes her was mired in old-school business bureaucracy.
Mattel Inc., which owns the iconic doll, has seen Barbie sales plummet 18 percent this year. Sales of other big Mattel brands have also fallen recently, including Hot Wheels and Fisher-Price, according to the company's financial statements. To explain the fall in popularity among once-desirable toys, Monday’s Wall Street Journal points to an unusual target: boring business meetings.
The WSJ article, which was based on over a dozen interviews with current and former Mattel employees and executives, describes how excruciating the company's meetings could be:
[D]ecisions on everything from marketing to product features dragged on through multiple sessions -- often with no final decision being made. Employees would spend weeks putting together elaborate “decks,” or PowerPoint presentations, that could run to 100 slides or more, detailing the minutiae of every upcoming product for a brand and every facet of a marketing campaign.
Even a seemingly simple decision like creating a school crest for one of Mattel’s fashion doll brands took eight meetings, WSJ reports, with the crest undergoing no fewer than 30 iterations before a final decision was made.
It’s no secret that business meetings are a productivity killer. In both 2012 and 2013, employees named meetings as the No. 1 time-waster in Salary.com’s annual “Wasting Time at Work” survey. Part of the reason meetings may be so mind-numbing is that they’re simply too long. Adult attention spans are only about 10 minutes, psychologists say. After that, people need to be re-engaged or else they lose focus.
Studies have shown that shorter meetings (as well as “standing meetings”) can be more productive than drawn-out conference room sessions. An analysis of more than 10,000 meetings hosted by the online meetings platform SalesCrunch over an 18-month period beginning in 2010 found that meetings lasting 15 minutes were 50 percent more successful than meetings lasting 45 minutes or longer.
But workplace calendars like Outlook often default to 30-minute time chunks, encouraging managers to schedule longer sessions. At Mattel, meetings got so bad that some employees scheduled fake events in their Outlook calendars so they could skip the meetings to get real work done, WSJ reports.
Monotonous meetings are probably not the only reason the company lost more than one-third of its market value in 2014. WSJ also attributes the decline to factors like the falling U.S. birth rate and the competition that traditional toys like Barbie face from iPads.
But the company seems to be focusing on meetings as one way to revamp itself. “There should be no more than a TOTAL of three meetings to make any decision,” said Mattel’s head of human resources in an August memo to employees, according to WSJ.
Depending on how long those three meetings are, that could be a step in the right direction.
NEW YORK (AP) — Starting Christmas Day, Wal-Mart is letting customers exchange gift cards from more than 200 retailers, airlines and restaurants for a Wal-Mart card. The cards don't expire and can be used in stores and online.
The exchange may send more shoppers to the website of the world's largest retailer.
It's a test program, but if it's successful, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said the card swap could become a permanent service. Wal-Mart spokesman Ravi Jariwala said the chain doesn't have specific metrics to evaluate that but will watch how shoppers react.
Shoppers won't get the full value of their gift cards to use at Wal-Mart. For example, with Amazon.com, customers can redeem up to 95 percent, while for Staples that figure is up to 90 percent and for Gap, up to 85 percent. For some brands, a Wal-Mart gift card will be worth just 70 percent of the original card.
Up to about $1 billion worth of gift cards will go unused this year, according to CEB TowerGroup, a consultancy. That's because recipients either lose them or can't figure out what to buy.
"We recognized that this was an opportunity," said Jariwala. "A large number don't get redeemed. We figured this was a good way to get gift cards in the hands of more customers."
He said that 95 percent of Wal-Mart holiday cards are typically redeemed by February.
Wal-Mart gift cards are the most sought-after on CardCash, the country's largest gift card exchange website, said CardCash CEO Elliot Bohm. CardCash is Wal-Mart's partner in the program. Financial terms of the deal weren't disclosed.
To exchange a card, go to http://walmart.cardcash.com and input your information. The Wal-Mart eGift cards should be emailed to you within an hour.
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On the eastern edge of St. Joseph, Missouri, lies the small city's only hospital, a landmark of brick and glass. Music from a player piano greets visitors at the main entrance, and inside, the bright hallways seem endless. Long known as Heartland Regional Medical Center, the nonprofit hospital and its system of clinics recently rebranded. Now they're called Mosaic Life Care, because, their promotional materials say: "We offer much more than health care. We offer life care."
Two miles away, at the rear of a low-slung building is a key piece of Mosaic—Heartland's very own for-profit debt collection agency.
When patients receive care at Heartland and don't or can't pay, their bills often end up here at Northwest Financial Services. And if those patients don't meet Northwest's demands, their debts can make another, final stop: the Buchanan County Courthouse.
From 2009 through 2013, Northwest filed more than 11,000 lawsuits. When it secured a judgment, as it typically did, Northwest was entitled to seize a hefty portion of a debtor's paycheck. During those years, the company garnished the pay of about 6,000 people and seized at least $12 million—an average of about $2,000 each, according to a ProPublica analysis of state court data.
Many were uninsured Heartland patients who were eligible for financial aid that would have eliminated or drastically cut their bills. Instead, they were charged full price for their care, without the deep discounts negotiated by insurers, according to court records, interviews and data provided by Heartland. No other Missouri hospital sued more of its patients.
Blue collar workers, Walmart cashiers, nursing home aides, clerical staffers—these types of patients have long been the most vulnerable to unexpected debt. They can't afford insurance, yet they're not poor enough for Medicaid. Even after the 2010 Affordable Care Act, about 30 million Americans remain uninsured, in part because some states, like Missouri, have not expanded Medicaid to cover more of the poor.
Earlier this year, ProPublica and NPR reported that the wages of millions of U.S. workers are diverted to pay off a variety of consumer debts. Most states, like Missouri, allow creditors to take a quarter of after-tax wages—an amount that government surveys show is unaffordable for lower-income families.
Consumer advocates say the laws governing wage garnishment are outdated and overly punitive, regardless of the debt's source. But the consequences are especially dire when garnishment is used to collect unavoidable health care bills—with interest and legal fees piled on.
No one tracks how many hospitals sue their patients and how frequently, but ProPublica and NPR found hospitals that routinely did so in Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Alabama, as well as Missouri. The number of suits is clearly in the tens of thousands annually. In Missouri alone, hospitals and debt collection firms working for them filed more than 15,000 suits in 2013.
Court records also revealed stark differences in how hospitals within each state pursued patients who couldn't pay their bills. In Missouri, a handful of hospitals, Heartland foremost among them, accounted for an outsized portion of suits. But many others, including the state's largest hospital, rarely, if ever, sued.
Heartland's aggressive tactics aren't because the hospital is strapped for cash. Despite being based in an economically struggling county of just 90,000, Heartland reported a $45 million profit last year and paid its chief executive $1.2 million, according to its annual report. The hospital declined to discuss Northwest's finances.
As a nonprofit, Heartland pays no income taxes and no property taxes on the acres of land it owns. In exchange for these tax breaks, it is expected to provide a benefit to the community—most crucially by providing care to lower income patients who can't afford to pay.
Tama Wagner, the hospital's chief brand officer, said the hospital does everything it can to fulfill that mission. Patients are offered multiple opportunities to qualify for financial assistance and avoid the possibility of legal action, she said, adding that it's better for everyone "if we attempt to work on things before it gets to this level."
But if patients don't utilize those resources, she said, the hospital must take action. "No one goes into this with the goal or the desire to ruin someone's life," she said. "But at the same time, the services were rendered, and we have to figure out how to get them paid for."
Asked why the hospital sues more patients than any other in the state, Wagner said, "I don't know."
Chi Chi Wu, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center, said Heartland's tactics ran counter to its mission. Nonprofit hospitals are given tax-exempt status "because they are supposed to be serving the public and especially the poor," she said.
But if hospitals are charging low-income, uninsured patients "even more and then garnishing their wages on the basis of these inflated amounts," there ought to be consequences, she said. "They should lose their tax-exempt status."
The center has recommended that federal regulators prohibit debt collectors from garnishing wages based on the high prices hospitals charge uninsured patients.
In interviews, former patients said they'd run up debts to Heartland mostly because, in an emergency, it's their only option. They never expected the hospital to seize their wages if they couldn't pay.
Northwest first sued Keith and Katie Herie when they couldn't afford the $14,000 bill for Katie's emergency appendectomy. While Northwest was seizing Keith Heries' pay for that suit, it sued him again over another hospital visit. Since 2006, the Heries have paid almost $20,000 and still owe at least $26,000, with interest mounting.
ProPublica and NPR shared Herie's case and other findings with Heartland's board of trustees, which is now reviewing the hospital's debt collection practices.
"Make it so people can make a dent in it," said Herie, 51, a drill operator. "There's a lot of people who want to be able to pay their medical bills...But they're not going to jeopardize their household for it."
Heartland Regional Medical Center, a nonprofit, is the only hospital in St. Joseph, Mo. The hospital and its system of clinics recently rebranded as Mosaic Life Care>
Docket filled with patients
On a morning last month inside Buchanan County's historic courthouse, the docket was stocked with more than two dozen Northwest cases.
"You have quite a few today," the judge noted with easy familiarity to Northwest's attorney, who last year filed more than 1,000 such suits.
In 2013, Northwest won judgments in 77 percent of its cases, usually because the defendants didn't show up, court records show. Only 3 percent of those sued had an attorney. And all of the judgments tacked on a 9 percent interest rate to the debt, the most allowed under Missouri law.
Most of the defendants who made it to court that day waited glumly, not entirely sure how the proceedings were supposed to go. Some had been served with lawsuits at work: Denny's, Walmart, a pig slaughterhouse, a local charity. A woman and her daughter had both been sued.
Whether debtors show up or not, the outcome seldom varies.
Some former patients agree to payment plans to avoid garnishment. But since Northwest requires these arrangements to be renegotiated or paid "in full" after six months, the plans are not a guaranteed reprieve from court action. A Heartland spokeswoman would only say the periodic reviews were company policy.
When her case was called, Tammy Berry, who earns $8.20 an hour working at the fast food chain Taco John's, told the judge incredulously, "They're already garnishing my paycheck." The judge acknowledged that might be true. But not, he said, for the case on the docket that day.
Berry, 48, and her husband Keith, 47, were first sued by Northwest in 2009. Since then, Northwest has garnished $4,500 from Tammy Berry's pay, almost all of it going to pay off interest (Keith Berry said he does not work and is applying for disability payments). The couple still owes $7,000 on that debt. The couple has had a number of ailments including issues with Keith's heart, but they are unclear on which led to the suits.
Then, while still being garnished for those bills, Berry said she fell ill with pneumonia and went to Heartland for treatment again. Northwest sued them for $4,600 more.
"We're living paycheck to paycheck," said Tammy Berry. She and her husband, Keith, were first sued by Northwest in 2009.
Federal law only protects the poorest of the poor from garnishment, and Tammy Berry is not poor enough. If she takes home more than $870 a month, her wages can be garnished. On the weeks she works full-time, the garnishments bring her take-home pay below the minimum wage.
The Berrys had qualified for charity care at Heartland for bills at other times, so the hospital has known that their finances were precarious, yet they were charged full price for Tammy Berry's treatment for pneumonia. Heartland spokeswoman Tracey Clark declined to explain this, but said "information has to be a two-way street."
At the judge's urging, the Berrys said they met with Northwest's attorney and offered to pay $20 every two weeks. The attorney told them he was not authorized to accept such a low offer and they would have to ask Northwest directly, the Berrys said. In the end, they agreed that they owed the debt and Northwest received a judgment against them.
Outside the courtroom, the couple slumped on a bench dejectedly and said they were uncertain how they would absorb this latest blow.
"We're living paycheck to paycheck," said Tammy Berry.
Low-income patients often sued
Nonprofits, which make up nearly 60 percent of U.S. hospitals, have a history of aggressive debt collection.
In the early 2000s, several faced lawsuits challenging their tax-exempt status based on their use of such tactics. In 2003 the Wall Street Journal ran a series of articles detailing the frequent use of garnishments by hospitals, including the prestigious Yale-New Haven Hospital.
"When the public saw that, they were shocked," said Rick Wade, then the spokesman for the American Hospital Association.
The AHA asked its members to review their debt collection policies. Many hospital executives were surprised by what they found and decided to revamp their practices, Wade said.
A handful of states subsequently passed laws either restricting how nonprofit hospitals can collect on debts or dictating how much financial assistance they must provide.
But in most states, there are no clear guidelines, and over time, public scrutiny has faded, said Nancy Kane, a professor with Harvard's School of Public Health. "Hospitals are not looking for opportunities to give away charity care."
Under federal law, nonprofit hospitals must offer care at a reduced cost to lower income patients, a service often called charity care. But crucial details—how poor patients need to be, how much bills are reduced, and how policies are publicized—are left to the hospital. The Affordable Care Act empowered the IRS to set new requirements for publicizing this information, but those have yet to be finalized.
At Heartland, uninsured patients with household incomes up to double the poverty line ($23,340 for a single person without dependents) qualify for free care. Those with incomes between 200 percent and 300 percent of the line (up to $35,010) are billed at a rate similar to what an insurer pays, then have their bills cut in half.
Last year, about 8,700 Heartland patients had their bills cut or zeroed out, according to data provided by Heartland. About half were uninsured, while the rest were spared full payment of deductibles or other obligations not covered by their insurance.
But uninsured patients like the Berrys who don't receive charity care—either because they were turned down or never applied—are billed at Heartland's standard rates, the sticker price that insurers never pay. In 2013, more than two-thirds of the accounts Northwest handled involved uninsured patients, according to data provided by Heartland.
If a patient can't pay and Northwest obtains a judgment, it's too late. Hospital policy says once the collection agency has "incurred legal fees" on a case, the patient is ineligible for charity care, regardless of earnings.
Charity care, Clark said, is reserved for patients who "seek it and legitimately work with us."
Court data shows that in 2013 Northwest garnished the wages of hundreds of lower income patients—including more than 50 employees of fast food restaurants such as McDonald's and more than 100 Walmart employees. Heartland's Clark said that Walmart employees constituted "only 3.6 percent" of the thousands of patients currently being garnished by Northwest.
The employees of a local pig slaughterhouse were Heartland's most frequent target. One of the largest employers in St. Joseph, Triumph Foods processes 6 million hogs a year and has 2,800 employees, according to its website.
In 2013, at least 255 Triumph employees had their wages garnished by Northwest—about one of every 11 employees.
Eight years of garnishments, no end in sight
Just after Christmas in 2004, Katie Herie got sick and then sicker with sharp pains in her stomach, nausea and vomiting. "I was running a fever," she said. "It was bad."
But Herie was uninsured, so for four days she held off going to the hospital. Finally, she said, "enough was enough."
Her appendix had ruptured. Surgeons operated at 2 a.m., Herie recalled. After four nights at Heartland, she was discharged. The pain was gone. But in its place was a bill for more than $14,000—including a charge of nearly $3,000 for the room alone, according to court records.
It was a staggering debt for the Heries. At the time, Keith Herie worked as a truck driver, earning around $30,000 annually, and his job didn't come with insurance. The couple had two young children.
When the surgery took place, Heartland's financial assistance policy restricted aid to those with household incomes below the federal poverty level. For a family of four, that was $18,850, so the Heries didn't qualify.
Monthly payment plans were also out of reach, they said. Heartland's guidelines state, for instance, that balances up to $5,000 should be repaid within 18 months. For a $5,000 balance, that would be a minimum of $278 per month, a sizeable burden for lower and middle income families. There's nothing in the guidelines about still larger balances. Patients who can't pay the minimum may be eligible for a "special contract agreement," but that could add on 9 percent interest.
In a statement, Heartland's Clark said the interest is added because "more operating costs are incurred the longer an account is active." Patients have a host of options to pay, she said, including credit cards or loans "from family/friends."
"They will tell you to borrow the money from somebody to pay the bill. They don't care," said Katie Herie.
Clark said records show that Northwest spoke twice with Keith Herie about a payment plan in 2005, but that he "would not commit to an arrangement." Herie said he doesn't recall those conversations, only feeling overwhelmed at the prospect of repaying the debt.
So, in March 2006, Northwest sued the Heries, but not just for the appendectomy. The suit included a host of other outstanding bills, from a 2001 chiropractor bill for Keith Herie to a $10 pediatrician's bill for their son. It turned out that Northwest handled accounts for local medical practices as well as Heartland. ProPublica reviewed hundreds of Northwest cases and almost all of them involved at least one Heartland debt.
The Heries' total debt stood just shy of $17,000. But then came the interest. To start, there was $1,654 of "prejudgment interest," and, for as long as the balance remained outstanding, the Heries would incur interest on it at a rate of 9 percent a year.
Shortly after winning a judgment, Northwest moved to garnish Keith Herie's pay. It did the same to Katie Herie, who had begun work at Sam's Club. Missouri law allows Northwest to sue both spouses, regardless of who received the medical care. An operations memo for Northwest states that both spouses should be named in a suit if the balance exceeds $1,500.
Over the years, the garnishments have tracked the couple, following Keith to a better paying job, where he operates a drill for a firm that inventories coal stockpiles. Most of the time, Northwest has taken 10 percent of his after-tax pay, a break Missouri gives debtors with children.
Unfortunately for the Heries, other visits to the hospital followed—for chest pains, for the flu. For these Heartland visits, the Heries would have qualified for charity care if they had applied because Heartland had changed its policy to include patients making up to three times the poverty line. But the couple says no one told them.
In 2010, when the Heries were still being garnished as a result of the first suit, Northwest sued the couple again for $17,630, including a nearly $1,600 attorney fee and about $2,900 in interest.
Over the past several years, the Heries' wages have been garnished almost continuously, with the money sometimes going to pay down one debt, and sometimes the other. They have chipped away, paying nearly $20,000, but still owe more than $26,000.
Northwest also has a lien on the Heries' home, meaning that they are unable to sell it or refinance their mortgage without resolving the debt. According to the company operations memo, this is done in all cases in which the company has won a judgment exceeding $1,000.
"It's like a never never plan – you're never going to get rid of it and you're never going to get ahead of it," said Keith Herie.
Some hospitals rarely sue over debts
Other hospitals in Missouri have found ways to avoid suing low-income patients.
BJC HealthCare, a nonprofit, operates a chain of 12 hospitals, including Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, the largest in the state. In 2013, Northwest filed about 2,300 lawsuits in Missouri courts. BJC filed 26.
Unlike Heartland, BJC automatically slices 25 percent off its standard rates for uninsured patients and never includes interest on payment plans, said June Fowler, BJC's spokeswoman.
As recently as only a few years ago, one BJC hospital often pursued patients in court. But BJC's CEO Steven Lipstein said the chain's new policies are both more efficient and more in line with its charitable mission. Patients who can pay a portion of their bills are more likely to, he said, if they learn about financial assistance and payment options early in the process.
Mark Rukavina, a Boston-area consultant who advises hospitals on billing issues, said many nonprofits actively seek to identify low-income patients who might qualify for help because they don't want to try to collect from those who can't pay.
At BJC, patients are often classified as eligible for financial assistance based on factors like their workplace, job title, or whether they live in a zip code with a low average income, Fowler said. While these patients might never complete the application process and be officially granted financial assistance, the hospital does not attempt collections on the accounts, she said.
At the end of each year, BJC writes off tens of millions of dollars in bad debt it believes comes from low-income patients who should have received charity care. By contrast, in its 2013 tax filings, Heartland says that none of its nearly $17 million in bad debt came from patients who were eligible for financial assistance.
For Natalie Elardo, 44, who has also been sued twice by Northwest over debts incurred at Heartland, policies like BJC's would have helped. Elardo had back surgery in 2000 and later received follow-up care for continued pain. She and her husband have paid more than $19,000 in garnished wages since being sued by Northwest in 2001. Their debts now exceed $80,000.
"I assume we will be paying them off until we die," she said.
Weighed down by similar medical debts, Keith Herie has considered declaring bankruptcy, but said he has focused mostly on working his way out, piling up as much overtime as he can.
"I've been putting it on hold, because I keep believing that somewheres I can make a difference, I can get ahead of this," he said.
The lawsuits and garnishments have had collateral effects. Herie's current job provides insurance for him, and he has added his children, but there is not room in the budget to add Katie. He has nothing saved for retirement.
Recently, Herie asked Northwest for a printout of all his debts. It ran to four pages filled with rows of charges in tiny type. It made him think bankruptcy may be the only answer.
"I'm catching up to 52 years old come spring, and I don't think I got another 10 years of this," he said. "I'm tired. I'm just mentally tired."
Jonathan Stray contributed to this story.
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Dec 12 (Reuters) - A Vermont T-shirt maker has been granted a trademark for the phrase "Eat More Kale," a decision the state's governor on Friday hailed as a victory for "the little guy" over a "corporate bully."
Bo Muller-Moore, who lives in Montpelier, had been ordered to cease using the phrase on T-shirts and other merchandise by the fried chicken chain Chick-fil-A, on the grounds it violated its trademarked slogan, "Eat Mor Chikn."
The United States Patent and Trademark Office this week approved Muller-Moore's application for the trademark, and on Friday he was joined by Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin on the steps of the state capital to declare victory.
"People recognize that a dude in Vermont that currently has people stealing my easily replicable designs, they recognize I need more protection," Muller-Moore said in an interview on Friday. "People recognize that I'm selling T-shirts online, and they're selling sandwiches in airports and malls and stand-alone stores. And there's plenty of room for each of us."
Muller-Moore's cause drew the support of top officials in Vermont, known for its commitment to family farms and small businesses.
"This isn't just a win for the little guy who stands up to a corporate bully, it's a win for our state," Shumlin said Friday. "In Vermont, we care about what's in our food, who grows it, and where it comes from."
A spokeswoman for Chick-fil-A, which is based in Atlanta, said in a email: "Cows love kale, too!"
Cows appear in the company's advertisements holding signs that read "Eat Mor Chikn."
The spokeswoman did not indicate whether the company would pursue further legal action against Muller-Moore.
Muller-Moore first created the "Eat More Kale" design in 2001 at the request of a friend who wanted a T-shirt he could sell to support his family farm. It's since become a rallying cry for enthusiasts of the leafy plant and healthy eating.
The kale battle was not the first time Chick-fil-A faced off with New England interests. In 2012, then-Boston Mayor Thomas Menino wrote a letter to the company asking it to stay out his city after its leadership came out publicly as opponents of gay marriage, which has been legal in Massachusetts for a decade.
The company has no locations in Vermont or in Boston, according to its website. (Reporting by Ted Siefer in Lowell, Massachsuetts; Editing by Scott Malone and Sandra Maler)
If you’re not a listener of the podcast “Serial,” you might have glanced at something that Best Buy tweeted earlier today and thought that it was either a complete non sequitur or a very roundabout promotion for mobile phones.
Today’s jobs report was great, but the U.S. labor market still has a long way to go before it’s back to pre-recession health. Which means it’s far too soon for the Federal Reserve to start trying to slow things down.
The U.S. economy added 321,000 jobs in November, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday, way past the 230,000 jobs economists expected. November was the best month for job growth since January 2012, and this year has been the best year for job growth since 1999. We are on a record streak of 50 months of unbroken job gains.
That’s all great, but here are three important points to consider before you get carried away by bolded, caps-lock headlines and exclamation marks. Janet Yellen and the Fed have been debating whether the labor market is as tight as suggested by the unemployment rate -- 5.8 percent, the lowest in more than six years. If it is, then the Fed might have to start raising interest rates to cool the economy down sooner rather than later. Today's report is another good indication that the job market is still not strong enough for the Fed to start raising rates, even if that’s what the bond market seems to think.
1) One great month is still just one great month. As big as that 321,000 number is, it’s a bump in the steady trajectory of what has been an amazingly consistent, but not quite good enough or fast enough, jobs recovery. This chart of the year-over-year change in jobs, by Bloomberg’s Matthew Boes, shows why America doesn’t just need one month like November. We need many more months like it.
2) Wages, wages, wages. They were up 2.1 percent in November compared to last year. Exciting! And definitely a good thing. But not enough of a good thing. The key, as Equitable Growth’s Nick Bunker highlights in the chart below, is context. Wage growth is stalled well below the Fed’s 3.5 to 4 percent target.
When it comes to pay rising significantly faster than inflation, it really hasn’t been America’s day, week, month, or even year(s). If we get more months with big job growth, big wage growth becomes more likely. But as any worker knows, hopeful signs for future pay raises aren’t the same as a bigger paycheck this week.
3) There are fewer Americans on the labor market’s fringes, but still far more than is healthy. Below, you can see a chart, courtesy of Quartz’s Matt Phillips, of the falling number of Americans who are working part-time jobs because they can’t find full-time employment. The decline is great, but there are still about 2 million more Americans working part-time when they want full-time work than before the recession.
Here’s another way to look at the same story. The chart below is a broader definition of unemployment (called U-6), minus the better-known unemployment rate (called U-3). What you are left with is a group of people who either: a) aren’t looking for a job because they don't think they will find one; b) have looked for a job in the past year but not recently; or c) are part-time workers who can't find full-time work.
This group represents all the workers who are ready to be put to better work. It’s a measure of what economists call “slack” in the labor market. There’s still a lot of it, and way more than before the recession.
The labor market is like late-70s fashion: Still far too much fringe.
America is making progress in undoing the damage of the recession, but not enough yet. And certainly not enough for the Fed to start raising interest rates.
As Black Friday bargain hunters continue to swarm stores across the country in their attempt to snag the best deals, reports have started emerging of shoppers growing violent in the frenzy for discounted wares.
At a Houston-area Walmart on Thursday night, police reportedly intervened after a fight broke out following a scramble for discounted Samsung flatscreen TVs. A video, said to have been taken at the Texas store, shows shoppers lying on top of the TVs on the ground, apparently in an attempt to prevent other people from buying them.
Also on Thursday, sheriff's deputies were called to a Walmart store in Norwalk, California, after two women started fighting over a Barbie doll, according to CBS Los Angeles. At least one of the women is reported to have thrown a punch.
"The whole thing was pretty stupid," a shopper told the news outlet. "That was very dumb."
At a Walmart in Michigan City, Indiana, another video on YouTube allegedly shows people tussling over $88 subwoofers. "Oh my God, that is crazy," one woman can be heard saying in the video as customers scrambled for the electronics.
KTLA reported that three shoppers at a Kohl's store in Tustin, California, were arrested early Friday following a shopping-related altercation. The shoppers included two women and one juvenile, said KABC-TV.
Two shoppers -- a man and his girlfriend -- were also arrested at an Indianapolis mall early Friday after they allegedly attacked an off-duty police officer. WXIN reports that the man had started a fight with another man in the parking lot after being ejected from the mall for being "too rowdy." An off-duty officer then tried to break up the fight, but the man and his girlfriend allegedly attacked him. The two individuals were subsequently arrested.
Elsewhere in the country, bargain hunters lined up for hours to get into their favorite stores. Plenty of "shoving" and general frenzy has been reported.
Shoppers head into Target just after their doors opened at midnight on Black Friday in South Portland, Maine.
Macy's opens its doors at 6 p.m. for Black Friday in New York City.
People enter a J.C. Penney store at the Newport Mall on Thursday in Jersey City, New Jersey.
This year, Black Friday brawls have also been reported across the pond in the U.K.
"Keep calm, people!"
Black Friday shopping chaos hits Britain: http://t.co/aQdwndulRO pic.twitter.com/0JNbGWCCM5
-- CBS News (@CBSNews) November 28, 2014
Fights breaking out #BlackFriday https://t.co/r5jT1spiKj
-- kadhim (@kadhimshubber) November 28, 2014
Lady down #BlackFriday https://t.co/ruJ5XnXasM
-- kadhim (@kadhimshubber) November 28, 2014
Black Friday sales to top £150m on Oxford Street alone - as fights and scuffles break out http://t.co/of3ogGjJg5 pic.twitter.com/A6KGCO1lq0
-- The Independent (@Independent) November 28, 2014
According to the BBC, several people were arrested and some were injured following shopping-related clashes in cities across the U.K. Police had to intervene in stores in London, Cardiff, Glasgow and elsewhere, as customers quarreled over discounted goodies.
On Friday, Manchester police urged shoppers to "keep calm."
