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Earl Aagaard’s opinions about everything that interests him. Og also enjoys gardening, travel, reading, woodbutchery, and lots of other stuff.

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AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF RETIRED PEOPLE RIPS OFF SENIORS…..

Arthur Laupus joined AARP because he thought the nonprofit senior-citizen-advocacy group would make his retirement years easier. He signed up for an auto insurance policy endorsed by AARP, believing the advertising that said he would save money….When Laupus…compared his car insurance rate with a dozen other companies, he found he was paying twice the average. ....Laupus stumbled onto something that many members of the world’s largest seniors’ organization don’t know: The group, formerly called American Association of Retired Persons, collects hundreds of millions of dollars annually from insurers who pay for AARP’s endorsement of their policies.(emphasis added)

So what, you ask? They need the money for all the good things they do for seniors, you say?

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Well, these “royalties” amounted to almost $500,000,000.00 (yes, that’s half a BILLION dollars) last year….a LOT of dough, being spent in part on slick brochures urging seniors to save money on insurance that costs twice as much as the average policy available elsewhere…..
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AARP is an organization that

ranks behind only Consumer Reports and the American Red Cross as the most trusted large group that influences U.S. politics and business, a 2007 Harris Poll found.

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And apparently they’re making good use of that trust…..they now market 17 different types of insurance, and the fact that the insurance companies are kicking back part of every dollar their members pay, makes it a bit hard to swallow their claim that they aren’t operating with a huge conflict of interest.
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Nowhere were AARP’s conflicting roles more evident than in its lobbying in support of a 2003 bill ... to expand Medicare….Thousands of AARP members complained that the legislation was a bad deal for seniors because it provided incomplete coverage and raised costs for seniors with low income.

After the Medicare bill was signed into law…AARP was able to expand its contract with Minnetonka, Minnesota-based UnitedHealth Group Inc., which underwrites AARP’s Medicare supplemental insurance plan.

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You’d think with a budget of over $1 Billion annually, AARP would be spreading the wealth in Washington, D.C., wouldn’t you? Au contraire….but perhaps not solely for reasons of propriety. They now have 40 million members and a tremendous reservoir of trust, remember? Do you suppose they might be capable of “getting out the vote”? Some people think so…...

“They don’t even have to give any campaign contributions,” says James Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University in Washington. “AARP’s enormous clout comes from the threat they could defeat people in Congress who don’t do what they want. They are the most powerful interest group in Washington.”

Rob Simmons, who served as a Republican congressman from Connecticut during 2001 through 2006, says he waited to learn AARP’s position on the 2003 Medicare legislation before deciding how to vote.

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READ THE WHOLE THING…....

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 12/06 at 07:20 PM

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