"Mass. family at center of suit; Class action alleges Prudential unfairly profited from death benefits" by Nan Levinson, Globe Correspondent | October 4, 2010
Kevin Lucey was at the wake for his son, Jeffrey, a Marine who had committed suicide at their Belchertown home in the summer of 2004, when military officers presented him with a stack of forms to sign.
They are just down the road, readers.
“I never read them. I just signed,’’ he said. “I wanted to get back to Jeff.’’
Three weeks later, Lucey received a kit from Prudential Insurance, which provides life insurance benefits to veterans on behalf of the federal government. He had the option of receiving the $250,000 payment in a lump sum or 36 monthly installments. Like most people, Lucey opted for the lump sum, and Prudential explained it had set up an “Alliance Account’’ in his name.
Still reeling from Jeffrey’s death, he asked his wife, Joyce, what she wanted to do about the money.
“I didn’t want to hear it,’’ she recalled. “I said it was blood money.’’
They stashed the kit in a drawer.
Several months later, on the advice of a colleague, Kevin Lucey decided to withdraw the money and invest it more profitably elsewhere. The paperwork had included what looked like a bank checkbook, so he wrote a draft for the balance. Prudential took nearly a month to send the money, he said.
Only much later did he learn that Prudential had never deposited any money in his account, instead investing it as part of its general account and passing on only a small portion of the interest earned, he said.
Infuriated, the Luceys agreed to put their names on a class action lawsuit against Prudential on behalf of all beneficiaries of dead soldiers and veterans who had requested lump sum payments. The suit, filed in federal court in Springfield in July, alleges that Prudential enriched itself at the beneficiaries’ expense by withholding lump sump payments and keeping an unjustifiable amount of interest....
Jeffrey Lucey was a 23-year-old lance corporal in the Marine Reserves when he hanged himself in his family’s Belchertown home in June 2004. He had enlisted in the Marines at 18, long before US troops entered Iraq. He and his parents had opposed that war, but when he was called up, he felt he had to go. After he came home in July 2003, he began drinking heavily, sleeping poorly, and acting erratically, raging at himself for what he had seen and done.
I just wanted to thank the criminal and complicit corporate media for lying us in there.
“He was slowly dying in front of our eyes and nobody knew what to do in our family,’’ said his mother, who wears his dog tags around her neck, along with a peace symbol pendant. Despite Jeffrey’s symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, they said, the Veterans Administration failed to help him.
Soldiers are only tools, another piece of equipment to be discarded when broken down.
In the summer of 2007, Cristobal Bonifaz, a passionate, 75-year-old lawyer practicing out of his barn in Conway, approached the Luceys about a suit he was considering against the Veterans Administration for negligence in dealing with military suicides, which were then barely acknowledged.
He is just up the road!
They agreed to be his first case, hoping the attention might ease the stigma of suicide and prod the VA to address the problem. After the government settled early last year, the VA changed some of its practices.
This summer Bonifaz brought the lawsuit against Prudential, after studying the 2009 annual report for Servicemembers’ Group Life Insurance and finding the numbers didn’t add up.
Servicemembers’ Group Life Insurance, created by Congress in 1965, is a basic entitlement for people in the armed services. It is group policy that the Department of Veterans Affairs purchases solely through Prudential....
According to a VA report, Prudential insured about 6 million people under the service members’ and veterans’ group plans in the 2009 policy year and collected nearly $1 billion in premiums.
War (and war dead) seems to be GOOD BIDNESS (or not)!
Prudential paid lump sum benefits by sending checks directly to beneficiaries until 1999, when, on the basis of an unwritten agreement with the VA, it introduced its Alliance Accounts and presented them to military beneficiaries as the only option for lump sum payments.
That SURE SMELLS LIKE COLLUSION and a CRIME!
Alliance Accounts are retained-asset accounts — interest-bearing, usually short-term accounts that function much like bank money market funds, minus federal protections and mandatory disclosures. Unlike bank accounts, they are not federally insured.
Meanwhile, the insurer sets the rate of interest it turns over to beneficiaries and keeps the bulk.
Maybe not illegal, but damn shady and underhanded!!
According to the lawsuit, the beneficiaries got 0.5 percent to 1.5 percent, while Prudential earned 5 percent to 6 percent.
Yeah, support the troopsth!
Bonifaz said Alliance Accounts are used as a kind of IOU, which Prudential employs to obscure its practice of profiting from money that doesn’t belong to the company....
For Paul Sullivan, executive director of the advocacy group Veterans for Common Sense and a veteran of the first Gulf War, the problem arises from too cozy a relationship between Prudential and the VA.
“Essentially, the VA was asleep at the switch,’’ Sullivan said.
Your government is broke, America. The FDA is fast asleep, the coal and oil regulators are bought off by industry, etc, etc, etc.
Congress should step in and regulate how for-profit companies deal with veterans’ benefits, he said. “What [Prudential] is doing is war profiteering.’’
Seems to be one of government's main functions. That and keeping Wall Street and Israel fat.
That is a sentiment echoed by the Luceys.
For Kevin, Kevin Lucey, it began when the VA failed them. “Then all of a sudden we have Prudential,’’ he said. “I remember as a little kid, you’d see it on TV and you would have the rock. This rock has cracked.
“They were a symbol of strength in America , and I just felt, my God, what’s America? It sort of erodes your faith.’’
Which is why it gets the capital K, sir.
Joyce Lucey added: “I’ve always noticed when [soldiers] are going off to war, everybody’s rah-rah, and when they come back it’s rah-rah for this real short time. And then the support is not there.’’
And you know who the lead cheerleaders were, dear readers.
That is why you are reading this.
--more--"
Related: Veterans Getting a Piece of Iraq
"VA kept pact from soldiers, families; Insurer allowed to stagger payouts" by David Evans, Bloomberg | September 15, 2010
LOS ANGELES — The US Department of Veterans Affairs failed to inform 6 million soldiers and their families of an agreement enabling Prudential Financial Inc. to withhold lump-sum payments of life insurance benefits for survivors of fallen service members, according to records made public through a Freedom of Information request.
The amendment to Prudential’s contract is the first document to show how VA officials sanctioned a payment practice that has spurred investigations by lawmakers and regulators. Since 1999, Prudential has used so-called retained-asset accounts, which allow the company to withhold lump-sum payments due to survivors and earn investment income on the money for itself.
The Sept. 1, 2009, amendment to Prudential’s contract with the VA ratified another unpublicized deal that had been struck between the insurer and the government 10 years earlier — one that was never put into writing, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in an upcoming issue....
Hmmmmmmmmmm!!!
“Every veteran I’ve spoken with is appalled at the brazen war profiteering by Prudential,’’ says Paul Sullivan, who served in the 1991 Gulf War as an Army cavalry scout and is now executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Washington. “Now vets are upset at the VA’s inability to stop Prudential’s bad behavior.’’
That the VA allowed Prudential to issue retained-asset accounts for 10 years while the contract required lump-sum payouts is “more evidence that the VA was asleep at the wheel for a decade,’’ said Sullivan, who was a project manager and analyst at the VA from 2000 to 2006....
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Let's go on suicide watch:
"Joint Chiefs chairman warns of rise in military suicides" by Bryan Bender, Globe Staff | September 30, 2010
WASHINGTON — The nation’s top military officer said yesterday that he expects suicides by service members, already alarmingly high, and other family crises to increase in the coming months as large numbers of troops return to their bases after years of multiple deployments....
That will make the Pru happy.
With the drawdown of US forces in Iraq accelerating, service members are finally beginning to receive a respite from frequent back-to-back tours of duty since 2003....
Yeah, let's hope and pray ANOTHER WAR doesn't BREAK OUT SOON (although judging from my recent papers Iran is being moved to the front burner again).
Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor: “We had five suicides in the Army last weekend.’’
In ONE WEEKEND!?
Military officials have worked to increase the length of time between deployments, both to promote greater stability among families and to provide more training for threats beyond the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Sigh. The only threat to AmeriKa is this insane idea of empire and its slavish service to Israel.
That is now starting to happen as the US military commitment in Iraq winds down, even as troop levels have grown in Afghanistan.
I guess it is BRING on IRAN and WWIII, 'eh?
--more--"
So expect more soldiers coming home and blowing their brains out:
"Army to evaluate its tactics against suicide" by Associated Press / October 28, 2010
DENVER — Military medical researchers say their efforts to stem the rising number of suicides among service members are based on good ideas, but they do not know which prevention programs work and which do not. They launched a $17 million study yesterday to find out....
The COSTS of the LIES are in ways that are often UNIMAGINABLE, Americans!!
I can tell you how to solve the problem without it costing you a cent:
END the DAMN OCCUPATIONS and BRING the TROOPS HOME!!
The new three-year project, funded by the Army, will develop a network of researchers to study multiple aspects of suicide, look at the work of other studies, and then compile a database so other researchers and people running suicide-prevention programs can see what is effective.
I hope it is ALL WORTH IT, America!!
I guess the WARS WON'T BE ENDING ANYTIME SOON!
More than 1,100 US service members killed themselves between 2005 and 2009.
In July, the Army announced a $50 million study of suicide and mental health....
That is separate from this initiative...
“What we hope to do at the end of this three years is to lay a very solid foundation on which other research can be built,’’ Army Colonel Carl Castro, director of the Military Operational Medicine Research Program at Fort Detrick, Md., said.
Are you getting a sick feeling like me, readers -- as if the troops are now test subjects?
Related: Alan Cantwell, MD On The ManMade Origin Of AIDS
The Anthrax Attacks and the AmeriKan MSM
Fort Detrick's missing samples
I do not trust anything out of Fort Detrick.
Who knows what they are doing to those soldiers they are "caring" for?
--more--"
I don't know how anyone comes to grips with behaving like a Nazi for empire, oil companies, and Israel. That's why they are killing themselves.
Now if only George W. Bush would eat a shotgun blast for breakfast. Then I might feel there is a tiny bit of justice in this world after all.
