Overcharging

Winding up in the emergency room is bad enough. But the California Supreme Court ruled Thursday that patients no longer have to worry about getting billed for emergency treatment charges that their HMOs fail to pay. Health maintenance organizations and patient advocates hailed the decision as an important protection against gouging by hospitals and physicians. But doctors said it would encourage greedy HMOs to underpay them and that that could put emergency rooms in jeopardy.

The middlemen who buy and sell fuel on the wholesale market have seen Los Angeles gasoline prices plunge more than 50 cents in the last two weeks. Too bad drivers aren't seeing the full benefit at the pump. On Friday, the most recent trading day, the wholesale gasoline price in Los Angeles hovered around $2.17 a gallon -- a figure roughly equal to a retail price of $2.77 a gallon after taxes and other costs were included.

In one of the biggest U.S. healthcare fraud settlements ever, Merck & Co. will pay $671 million to settle claims it overcharged the government for four popular drugs and bribed doctors to prescribe its drugs, federal prosecutors said Thursday.

Supreme Court justices on Tuesday heard a recounting of what lawyers called "the worst electricity market crisis in history." And they heard the story of how Enron Corp. and others helped create the spike in electricity prices in California and the West during 2000 and 2001.

Jesus Rodriguez knew he was going to come up short on his bills, so on a recent Friday afternoon he took his accustomed trip to a Baldwin Park strip mall. The produce-truck driver walked into a payday lending business nestled alongside a Chinese fast-food joint and a dental office. He wrote out a personal check for $300 and walked out with $255 cash. The 33-year-old Mexican immigrant basically gave away $45 to get the advance, but he said he didn't see a lot of other options.

The California company headed by former Veterans Affairs Secretary Anthony J. Principi overcharged the agency some $6 million under a long-term contract to conduct physical evaluations on veterans applying for disability benefits, an audit has found. The report, released Thursday, also questioned a proposal by the Department of Veterans Affairs to amend the contract with the company -- QTC Management Inc., based in Diamond Bar -- to charge higher rates than currently authorized.

Whenever I hear talk about universal healthcare in the U.S., I shudder. Don't get me wrong, I firmly believe that access to healthcare should be a right, not a privilege. What I fear is universal access to a system that, in my opinion, is fundamentally flawed. We spend more per capita on healthcare than any other country in the world. A lot more. Especially considering that nearly one-sixth of the population has no health insurance. And the costs keep rising.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power will refund $160 million that it overcharged other government agencies for more than a decade, the state attorney general's office announced Monday.

Catholic Healthcare West's $423-million settlement with former patients who claimed they were charged excessive fees won a judge's final approval, a lawyer for patients said. Superior Court Judge Richard A. Kramer in San Francisco approved the accord resolving claims for as many as 780,000 uninsured patients at Catholic Healthcare West hospitals, attorney Kelly M. Dermody said.

Mexico's antitrust agency announced Thursday that it was looking into potential price manipulation behind recent rising tortilla prices south of the border. Tortilla prices have soared more than 60% in some markets in recent weeks, sparking outrage from consumers and calls by some legislators to regulate the price of the main source of nutrition for Mexico's poor.