What a week! Three big victories in California will keep us safer from dangerous doctors, toxic polluters and privacy invasions, but we only got there thanks to your support.
State Senator Curren Price and Assemblyman Richard Gordon proposed yesterday to strip the California Medical Board of its authority over physician discipline. The physician-run Board has let dangerous doctors keep practicing as investigations take years to complete. You joined us, and families who lost loved ones to reckless prescribing, when we called for a transfer of doctor investigations to impartial prosecutors at the Department of Justice.
Senator Price said it all when he told the LA Times he proposed cutting the Board’s power because, “I don’t want anybody else to die.” With your help we’ll keep the pressure on in Sacramento to make this reform a reality.
On Wednesday, the state’s top toxics regulator shut down the state’s largest battery recycler, Exide, for leaking lead, arsenic and other toxins into the surrounding community for more than two decades. The action came only after Consumer Watchdog exposed endemic failures at the Department of Toxic Substances Control to prevent pollution and punish serial polluters in our report, Golden Wasteland. Nevertheless, Californians could be on the hook for millions in clean-up costs because the DTSC never required the company to put money away for cleanup.
Rounding out this week’s trifecta was a rare reversal by Google on the privacy front: The internet giant quietly stopped sharing consumers’ private emails and addresses with app developers that use its Google Play store. The reversal came after a Consumer Watchdog complaint to the Federal Trade Commission and California Attorney General Kamala Harris that Google was not only violating consumers’ privacy, but violating its own agreement with the FTC not to share information without consumers’ permission.
And this breaking news: This morning, the Court of Appeal sided with us to reject Mercury Insurance’s attempt to throw out a case the company has delayed for nearly a decade. The suit would hold Mercury accountable for charging illegal broker fees to consumers. We are fighting that battle on a second front before an administrative judge in San Francisco right now.
So that’s really four big wins this week. Thanks for sharing them with us.
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Posted by Carmen Balber, Executive Director of Consumer Watchdog. Follow Consumer Watchdog on Facebook and on Twitter.