Rebates

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said he had asked Amgen Inc. to "account for notably high rebates" the company had offered physicians for prescribing Aranesp, an anemia drug. Thousand Oaks-based Amgen paid almost $800 million in rebates to 6,000 facilities, including physician groups, in 2006, Grassley said, citing company data. Doctors collected payments from Medicare and insurers that exceeded the price they paid for the drugs, he said. An Amgen spokeswoman said the company provided rebates, like many of its competitors, to its customers.

Say you buy a car that coughs out a lot of greenhouse gases. Should you pay more for the privilege of polluting? And say your neighbor buys a car that spews out far less. Should he be rewarded for helping to save the planet? This week, the California Assembly is expected to vote on the California Clean Car Discount Act, which, if passed, would be the nation's first "feebate" law, imposing charges and granting rebates based on a vehicle's emission of carbon dioxide and other gases.

As part of an effort to energize the economy, more than 130 million people will get rebate checks from the government this year in amounts ranging from $300 to $1,200. Most households will get an additional $300 for each child under the relief bill President Bush said he would sign this week. All must file an income-tax return for 2007 to qualify. Here are some questions and answers about the checks: Who gets a rebate?

About 20 million Social Security recipients and other Americans who aren't required to file tax returns will need to do just that if they want to get rebate checks under the economic stimulus package signed into law Wednesday. The Internal Revenue Service said it would conduct a sweeping program to publicize the requirement to file a return, but some experts said many people eligible for rebates would fall through the cracks.

Michigan, home of the automotive industry, is raising the stakes in the nationwide competition for Hollywood's lucrative film jobs. In what it bills as the most generous film incentives program in the country, the Great Lake State is announcing today that it will begin offering a 40% rebate on production spending to filmmakers, as well as tax credits for companies that invest in new studios. "Michigan has a great work force, great locations and now this great incentive," said Gov. Jennifer M.

Prepare yourself. Tax rebates intended to jolt recession-wary consumers into spending won't start arriving in mailboxes until next month, but tax-rebate advertising has begun. And retailers are only warming up. "We will get inundated when those checks start coming," said Rob Enderle, an analyst at market research firm Enderle Group. "There's going to be a lot of competition for those dollars." The rebate checks are the centerpiece of a $168-billion stimulus package enacted by Congress.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson said Sunday that he wouldn't rule out a second stimulus package but first wanted to gauge the effects of rebate checks already sent out. He said on NBC's "Meet the Press" program that he was taking a wait-and-see approach on a possible second round of economic aid, an idea that congressional Democrats are pushing to a vote. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.

Attention, online shoppers! You can get cash rebates or free merchandise just for doing the shopping you're probably already doing on the Internet. Brand-name merchants such as Gap, Apple, Target, Office Depot and hundreds of others are involved. All you have to do is shop them using one of several rebate sites on the Web. It may be a long time before you reap enough rewards to earn even a toaster. And you have to be willing to give up some privacy.

California homeowners are rejecting new rebates for solar power equipment, saying the state has made installing the rooftop panels far more costly than expected. As a result, Public Utilities Commission reports show a decline of 78% in rebate requests in the first three months of this year, compared with last year, and the solar installation industry says it is threatened with collapse across much of California. At issue is a requirement the state added Jan. 1 for getting a rebate under Gov.

California's ambition to have solar-electric generating panels on the rooftops of 1 million homes got a hoped-for boost Thursday. Fixing a glitch in a 6-month-old rebate program that made solar power too expensive in parts of the state, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state energy regulators moved swiftly to enact changes to make the program more financially attractive.