Dumping your big bank? How to choose a new one

By E. Scott Reckard, Los Angeles Times

7:10 PM PDT, June 26, 2010

Mark and Roberta Maxwell had been zapped by fees for overdrawing funds and using the wrong ATM, and they felt their bank, the former Washington Mutual, had lost its personal touch since a takeover by Chase.

Adding insult to injury, Roberta said, they had to pay a special fee for depositing more than $5,000 in cash to their small-business account in a single month — something they might do again because Mark, a saxophone player, earns much of his living selling his smooth-jazz CDs at street fairs.

"I thought banks were supposed to want you to put more money in them," Roberta said.

So the Maxwells moved their account last year to the Studio City office of the Musicians' Interguild Credit Union, joining what could be the vanguard of angry consumers abandoning major banks in favor of smaller ones.

It's an appealing notion in an era of outrage over the huge bailouts and high fees of the big banks. Consumers are much more willing to switch banks than they were before the financial crisis, according to a recent survey by market research firm J.D. Power & Associates. Two-thirds of the big-bank customers surveyed said they would consider jumping to a smaller institution.

It's too soon to tell whether switch-your-bank campaigns, including the Move Your Money crusade undertaken by website entrepreneur Arianna Huffington, have prompted a significant number of bank customers to trade down.

The big banks aren't exactly giving up on you. In California, in fact, they're battling one another for market share. And, to be fair, it's hard to beat them for convenience, cutting-edge technology, pervasive automated teller machines that are free to customers, and a variety of options for deposits and other products.

For example, the Maxwells could have increased the amount of cash they were allowed to deposit each month without incurring a fee to $10,000 or even $25,000 — if they had sat down with a Chase small-business specialist and discussed alternative types of deposit accounts, said Gary Kishner, a spokesman for Chase, a unit of JPMorgan Chase & Co.

At Bank of America, the country's largest bank, first-year Chief Executive Brian T. Moynihan is spearheading an effort to encourage employees to put customers' needs first instead of simply maximizing revenue, a strategy that sounds much like marketing pitches for smaller banks and credit unions.

There are pitfalls as well as potential benefits in switching. If you're thinking about it, here are some issues and options to consider.

Credit unions

If you're a regular consumer seeking an alternative to the big banks, a credit union might be your best bet.

"Consumer banking is what credit unions do," said Edward J. Carpenter, an Irvine investment banker who has advised hundreds of start-up banks.

Credit unions don't actually have customers; they have members. To join one, you have to be in a group the credit union serves. But it's usually easy to find credit unions you can join. One may serve residents of the area you live in. Another may cater to employees at your workplace. To search for one, go to the National Credit Union Administration website .

Services vary greatly, but many credit unions offer a wide range of deposit options, auto and home loans, credit cards, and even loans for boats and RVs. Some provide small-business banking and investment advisory services. Through alliances, credit union members can access ATM networks of as many as 25,000 machines free of charge.

Because they pay no taxes and are organized to benefit members, not shareholders, credit unions generally are able to pay higher interest rates on deposits than banks — and charge lower rates on credit cards and auto loans. Mortgage rates tend to be about the same.

For many people who switch to credit unions, fees may be the biggest difference they notice. A study last year by economists at UC Davis and Dartmouth College found that fees for overdrafts at credit unions averaged $23, compared with $33 at banks. The typical credit union charge for using an out-of-network ATM was $1.50; at banks it was $2.50.

Although they tend to take on much less risk than the megabanks do, credit unions, like all consumer lenders, have suffered loan losses in recent years, some more than others. At the end of 2009, 64 California credit unions had the equivalent of a D or F on their confidential regulatory report cards, five times the number at the end of 2006, said John J. McKechnie III, spokesman for National Credit Union Administration, which regulates federally insured credit unions.

Keep reading for tips on how to check out the stability of a credit union or bank.

Community banks

If you're considering a community bank, make sure it's a good fit for you by talking with officials at the bank and maybe even some customers. The reason: Community banks generally are set up to accommodate the needs of small businesses, not the average person with a small checking and savings account.

"Consumer accounts are very hard to deal with from a regulatory standpoint, and you need a bunch of them to do it efficiently," said Anaheim-based bank consultant Gary S. Findley. Banks with less than $500 million in assets generally aren't in a position to do much for consumers, he said.

What's more, Findley said, small banks are devoting so much attention to raising fresh capital and working out troubled real estate loans that they might not be as free as they'd like to make new loans.

In the middle

A notch up the food chain are larger regional banks with the wherewithal to do consumer business if they choose. But many of them also are still digging their way out from losses, or don't aim their services at the mass market, or both.

The "find a bank or credit union" button atop the Move Your Money website launched by Huffington can give potential switchers a list of local, financially sound smaller banks. In Southern California, the list includes City National Bank, an L.A.-based lender with $20 billion in assets, and Pasadena's OneWest Bank, a $28-billion thrift that emerged from the wreckage of failed IndyMac Bank.

However, City National, once known as Beverly Hills' "bank to the stars," doesn't provide many services that everyday consumers might want. Auto loans? No way, unless as a favor to a longtime client who, say, collects antique cars. And the bank's $3.5-billion mortgage portfolio holds loans custom-tailored to wealthy borrowers with an average of 43% equity in their homes.

As a savings and loan, OneWest is friendlier to the average consumer, offering home loans, savings accounts, certificates of deposit and checking accounts — but no credit cards or auto loans.

Big but not so big

Other possibilities are the large but not gigantic banks that received the highest ratings in California in the J.D. Power survey: Bank of the West, with $60 billion in assets, and Union Bank, with $85 billion.

Both offer consumer as well as business services and have giant parent companies based overseas: France's BNP Paribas owns Bank of the West, while Japan's Bank of Tokyo- Mitsubishi UFJ owns Union Bank.

Strong financial support from Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, including a $2-billion capital infusion last September, has made it easier for Union Bank to weather the financial crisis without sacrificing customer service, said Tim Wennes, Union Bank's chief retail banking officer.

Bank of the West is "small enough that you can take a community bank approach" while offering a full range of products, said Andy Harmening, a senior executive vice president.

Check 'em out

Because the financial health of credit unions and small banks and thrifts can vary significantly, it's a good idea to check them out online. You can view independent soundness ratings free at Bankrate.com or from Bauer Financial Inc .

In addition, credit unions' quarterly reports to regulators are available online . Similar data from banks and thrifts are available from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp .

Regardless of how big or how highly rated your financial institution is, make sure you stay under the federal deposit insurance coverage limit of $250,000 per customer.

The bottom line

For many people, a bigger bank may be better. But if you can find the right one for you, a small institution may simply try harder to make you happy. Even in online banking, which is dominated by large banks, a survey this year awarded the highest satisfaction ratings to credit unions, and smaller banks outshined the five biggest institutions.

"While the big companies try to outdo each other with lots of flashy bells and whistles, the small banks have had to keep their focus on satisfying the customer because that's the only way they can compete," said Larry Freed, president of research firm ForeSee Results, which conducted the survey for Forbes.com. "And as the data shows, it's paid off."

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-switching-banks-20100627,0,6533132,print.story

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Mexican state security minister can't trust her own police

By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times

June 27, 2010

Reporting from Morelia, Mexico

As dozens of gunmen fired more than 2,700 deafening rounds of ammunition, Minerva Bautista crouched on the floor of her heavily armored SUV, screaming into her radio for backup and thinking one thing: "I know help will come."

But when the minister of security for Michoacan state heard the rounds begin to penetrate her car's armor, sending pieces of metal into her back "like fiery sparks," her faith faltered. And when one of her badly injured bodyguards asked her to take care of his family, she lost hope.

"They didn't just want to kill us," she said later. "They wanted to destroy us."

A seemingly interminable 15 minutes after the attack began in a narrow highway pass that night in April, rescuers finally arrived.

It was one of the most brazen assaults on a top state official in President Felipe Calderon's nearly 4-year-old offensive against drug cartels. But there is an even darker side to the story, one that exposes a fundamental flaw in the war: So deep is drug-financed corruption, the lead suspects in the attack on Bautista are the very police she commands.

Four people were killed, but Bautista, 36, suffered only relatively minor wounds. At least as remarkable as her survival is the fact that she has returned to the top security job here in Calderon's home state, where a notorious drug gang called La Familia has penetrated most police and judicial bodies.

She no longer lives at home with her parents but in a safe house, and she moves around with a mini-army of soldiers as guards. Public knowledge of her schedule is kept deliberately vague; her once customary visits to city halls, neighborhoods, schools and prison yards now curtailed. And she has had to recalibrate how, and whom, to trust.

"Of course I am afraid … but I have an even greater conviction now to keep working," Bautista told The Times in her first post-attack interview with a non-Mexican publication.

"If I don't do it, another colleague will have to," she said. "It would be a very negative message to the people of Michoacan if authorities, faced with this situation, say, 'Let's get out of here.'"

Tall and thin, with her blond-highlighted hair pulled in a tight ponytail, Bautista wears lots of blue eye shadow, a sparkling crucifix and a denim shirt with the logo, "Michoacan is working." She steps gingerly but with precision, feeling the metal pieces of shrapnel still lodged in her back and one leg. She smiles and laughs easily, despite the tension engulfing her surroundings.

It's a long way from her days as a schoolteacher and school union activist. A third-generation native of Michoacan, she sank herself into politics, joining the leftist Democratic Revolution Party that has ruled the state for most of the last decade and eventually catching the eye of Gov. Leonel Godoy. Last year he plucked her from a mid-level position in the Public Security Ministry, where she had gravitated after leaving the classroom, and placed her in the top job.

Bautista says she wanted to represent Godoy's idea of a "new face" for public security, one that emphasized citizen participation, education and prevention programs over military might. But one way or another, she managed to cross La Familia.

As part of the investigation of the attempted assassination, more than 100 police officers have been interrogated and their weapons submitted to ballistics tests in a search for suspects, a search that has proved fruitless.

La Familia, known for producing methamphetamine and decapitating enemies, has undermined all attempts to crack down on cartels and restore law and order. Three senior members of the Security Ministry were killed last year, and Bautista's predecessor was arrested on drug-trafficking charges.

These are scenarios that, with one drug gang or another, have been repeated across Mexico. But in contrast with other parts of the country, Michoacan authorities have not conducted a major purge of local police forces, another sign of La Familia's sway.

Authorities suspect corrupt cops tipped gunmen loyal to La Familia to Bautista's movements and route that April night.

Her would-be killers chose well. The spot on the highway where they attacked is flanked by embankments that gave gunmen the advantage of height. They moved a stolen cargo truck across the highway to block her vehicle's escape.

The area is also a spot where cellular telephone and radio signals are spotty. That and the chaos of the moment delayed help. Initially she couldn't even raise anybody on her radio.

She acknowledges there was negligence, or worse. Police patrols that were supposed to be tending the area had not materialized.

"They planned it very well, and we failed in providing the vigilance necessary," she said. "It was an attack from which I wouldn't expect we would emerge alive. Only later did we realize fully the magnitude of the attack."

For the first 10 minutes, she was confident help would come. But as time under the relentless barrage of grenades and .50-caliber rounds dragged on, she prepared to die.

The state prosecutor's office later said more than 2,700 spent shells were collected from the scene and that about 350 ammo rounds hit Bautista's car. Three grenades also hit it but somehow failed to detonate.

The gunmen fled when they heard the shouts of arriving state police. The bloody aftermath of dust, smoke, agonized screams and destroyed vehicles included four dead: two civilian motorists, who happened to be on the road, and two of Bautista's entourage.

"This kind of thing makes you reflect, and one thought I had was … to quit. But it would have been a defeat," she said. "I used to be very trusting of everybody, and now I am extremely suspicious. I'm more observant of people, what they do, what they say, details I might not have noticed before."

Bautista is not married and has no children, which is why, until the attack, she continued to live with her parents, an arrangement typical in Mexico. Were she a mother, she said, her willingness to put her life on the line might be different. She hopes to marry soon — her boyfriend works in security in her department.

The assassination attempt essentially wiped out an entire shift of her regular protection. Guards previously seconded from the state police force have now been augmented by the better-trained, better-armed military.

The time and venue of the interview with The Times was changed twice and finally took place in a hotel. There, seating was chosen based on the ability to guard two access points. A contingent of soldiers surrounded the hotel. Other well-armed guards in body armor and attached to radios flanked the table where Bautista sat with a reporter and two aides.

It remains a matter of speculation as to exactly why she was targeted — whom she offended or betrayed and how, and who ordered her death. Bautista says she had not received threats, and consequently hadn't taken extraordinary security measures. She suggested that her work, including a number of changes in the leadership of public security departments, had "created discomfort" and may have led to the attempted assassination.

Other Michoacan sources said, however, that several e-mail messages were sent to Bautista this year purporting to be from La Familia and ordering her to step down. In Michoacan, that is the kind of warning that you ignore at your peril.

In the interview, Bautista downplayed the role of her police in the attack, saying that was one of several lines of investigation. But she also acknowledged that the culprits probably would never be arrested and prosecuted, and that would be a shame, she said.

"I hope there are eventually arrests because these are people prepared to do absolutely anything, acting completely in cold blood," she said. "As cases go unresolved, there is more impunity, and criminals, common ones and the ones in organized crime, know they can get away with it. Nothing happens to them."

Bautista supports a federal government plan to consolidate police forces and create a single police agency for each state, loyal to a single command. This would eliminate scores of easily corruptible municipal police forces and, in theory, enhance security.

But a lot of Bautista's plans for reforming state security are on hold now, and she's turning greater attention to technology, such as the use of 500 new surveillance cameras here in Morelia, a colonial city known for its picturesque architecture before it became the center of La Familia terror.

"I am very worried about the situation, and it makes me rethink what we are doing," Bautista said. "We saw how vulnerable we are."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-bautista-20100627,0,6741150,print.story

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Alzheimer's as seen by a patient who is also a doctor

by Arthur Rivin

June 27, 2010

I am a retired physician and an emeritus professor of medicine. I also have Alzheimer's disease.

Before my diagnosis, I was certainly familiar with the disease, having seen patients with Alzheimer's over the years in my internal medicine practice. But I was slow to suspect my own affliction.

Now that I've been diagnosed, I can trace my problems back some 10 years, to when I was 76. I had been chairing a monthly program in medical ethics, and I knew most of the speakers and found it easy and enjoyable to introduce them. Then, suddenly, I found I had to rely on prepared material to make the introductions. I started to forget names, though never faces. These kinds of lapses are common in aging brains, so it was easy for me to write them off to "senior moments."

In the following years, I had coronary surgery and then two TIAs (transient ischemic attacks), or small strokes. My neurologist attributed my problems to them, but my mind continued to deteriorate even though I had no more strokes. The final blow was the occasion one year ago when I was receiving a citation for service in my hospital. I stood up to thank the presenters and found that I could not say a word.

It was my wife who insisted I go to the doctor for a diagnosis. As much as I was in denial and tried to dismiss my lapses as normal aging (doctors are often not willing patients), she knew something was wrong. My internist put me through a few memory tests in the office and then ordered a PET scan of the brain, which predicts Alzheimer's with 95% accuracy.

After the diagnosis, I was started on a medicine called Aricept, which has been used for many years and which has many side effects. I had two of them — bad diarrhea and appetite loss. I'd had a few Alzheimer's patients in my practice who had taken this medicine with no benefit, so I wasn't expecting much. I wanted to abandon it because of the side effects, but my doctor urged me to continue. The side effects disappeared and another drug, Namenda, was added. These drugs are by no means miracle cures, and in many patients they have little effect. I was one of the rare lucky ones.

In two months I was much better, and I am now close to normal. At my worst, I had difficulty speaking, did not know the names of my grandchildren or my doctor, could not add or subtract or find my way home. Now I can do all these things.

We've come a long way in our understanding of the disease since Dr. Alois Alzheimer, a German physician, first established a link in the early 20th century between dementia and the presence of plaques and tangles of an unknown material. That material is now known to be the accumulation of a peptide called Beta-amyloid. The leading hypothesis for the mechanism of Alzheimer's disease is that Beta-amyloid accumulates in brain cells, leading to neurodegeneration. Some pharmaceutical approaches are now targeted at clearing this protein from cells. However, amyloid plaques can be detected only in autopsy, so they have been associated only with people who had full-blown Alzheimer's symptoms. It is unknown whether these are the earliest biomarkers of the disease. Despite years of study, there is still so much we don't know.

But there are also things we are learning, some of them from personal journeys like my own. Since my improvement, I have developed a list of insights I'd like to share with others facing memory problems. Carry a small book and write notes whenever there's something you want to recall later. When you cannot remember a name, make a joke and ask the person to repeat it, then write it down. Read books. Take walks. If you cannot walk, exercise in bed. Draw and paint. Garden, if you can. Do puzzles and games. Try new things. Organize your day. Learn to prepare food, eat, dress, wash and go to bed in an efficient way. Eat a healthful diet that includes fish twice a week, fruits and vegetables and omega-3 fatty acids. A reliable and good-humored book on a serious subject is "The Memory Bible" by Dr. Gary Small.

Don't withdraw from your friends and your family. This is advice I had to learn the hard way. Afraid of being pitied, I tried to keep my condition a secret, and that meant pulling away from people I cared about. But now that I've decided to be open, I've been gratified to see how accepting people are and how willing to assist.

For help with your own or a loved one's severe memory failure, the best source is the Alzheimer's Assn., with offices in most cities and a central office in Chicago. It has information about caregivers, treatments and research, and it exists to help. Its latest information is sobering. There are currently 5.3 million Americans with the disease. It affects one in eight people over 65, and almost half of those over 85. The number of people in the U.S. with Alzheimer's is expected to double by 2030.

This rapidly growing problem has prompted pharmaceutical companies to join together in 2004 with the National Institutes of Health to form a partnership called the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative. It is developing clinical trials and freely exchanging information about its results. Its findings will be reported to the public in July.

I know that I, like every other human, will eventually die. So I made myself aware of the documents that I needed to examine and sign while I was still able and alert, things like advance directives, living wills and POLSTs (physician's orders for life-sustaining treatment). I've tried to make sure that those who love me know my wishes. When I do not know who I am, or recognize anyone, and I am incapacitated with no chance of improvement, I want comfort and palliative care only.

Arthur Rivin practiced internal medicine in Los Angeles and is a professor emeritus at UCLA.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-adv-rivin-alzheimers-20100627,0,2157018,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Mexican Violence Deters U.S. Colleges

MEXICO CITY — From perfecting their use of the subjunctive in colonial Puebla to exploring the anthropological aspects of Tijuana's gritty underside, American college students have long used Mexico as a learning lab. This summer, however, far fewer will be venturing across the border, as universities and students alike fear the violence tied to drug gangs that have caught some innocents in the cross-fire.

In March, two Mexican university students were killed at the prestigious Tecnológico de Monterrey when fighting broke out between Mexican soldiers and drug traffickers on the streets outside. Universities in the border cities of Ciudad Juárez and Reynosa have seen violence tread dangerously close to their campuses as well.

A direct result of the attention-getting bloodshed has been the mass cancellation of study-abroad programs throughout the country, including those hundreds of miles from the most dangerous areas. Some educators on both sides of the border consider the reaction to be an exaggerated response.

“To make an analogy,” said Geoffrey E. Braswell, an associate anthropology professor at the University of California, San Diego , “I would not have considered taking students to Mississippi during the early 1960s or to Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention, but other parts of the U.S. were of course safe for travel. Mexico is that way.”

This fall, Professor Braswell plans to help students understand ancient Mesoamerica by visiting 28 archaeological sites and numerous other museums in central Mexico.

No American students are known to be have been hurt in the violence, and Mexico is not the first country to find many of its foreign students are staying away. Israel, Kenya and Haiti have all experienced the temporary shutdown of study-abroad programs after the State Department issued warnings about traveling there.

The University of Kansas had 18 students ready to fine-tune their Spanish skills this summer in Puebla, southeast of Mexico City. Then multiple killings in distant Ciudad Juárez in March prompted the State Department to issue a travel warning for northern Mexico. The university canceled its Puebla program, geography aside.

As a matter of policy, the University of Kansas bans study abroad anywhere in a country with an official travel warning, even if the danger being cited is nowhere near where the program will be. In a last-minute switch, the Kansas students were shifted to Costa Rica.

“It's a blanket policy even if there are areas that are safe,” said Sue Lorenz, director of the Office of Study Abroad at the University of Kansas. “We have a pretty cautious policy.”

California State University , which has 23 campuses, similarly banned all university-sponsored activities in Mexico after the State Department warning in March.

But it allows the chancellor to issue waivers on a case-by-case basis for areas not specifically mentioned in the warning. About a dozen waivers have been issued for programs in Puebla, Guadalajara, Guanajuato, Oaxaca and Querétaro. But Tijuana, just across the border from San Diego State University, part of the California State University System, did not make the list of safe locales, much to the frustration of many students and professors.

Over the past 11 years, Victor Clark Alfaro, a lecturer at San Diego State University, has led field trips in Tijuana's red-light district to let his students see firsthand how Mexicans regulate vice. He has lured smugglers out of the shadows and into his class. A big believer that studying the border requires actually being there, he has piled his students into a bus to show them one of Mexico's most important trading posts.

“It's like any large city in the world,” Mr. Clark said of his native Tijuana. “You take precautions.”

Mr. Clark said that none of his students had experienced any dangerous episodes during their chaperoned study visits. Exposure to the bustling city, he contends, has given his students, all of whom speak Spanish, great insight into another culture. “We had an educational advantage being at the border, being able to study both sides,” he said.

Ironically, Mr. Clark noted that violence in Tijuana is down considerably this year compared with the previous two years, when his classes were allowed. Still, in an indication of just how subjective danger is, he defended the relative safety of Tijuana by declaring, “It's not Juárez.”

Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, has had more drug-related killings than any other Mexican city in recent years. Still, some boosters there insist it remains safe for American students to study. The Mexican Solidarity Network , a Chicago nonprofit group that holds study-abroad programs in Mexico, recently canceled its Ciudad Juárez summer program, which was to begin this month, not for fear of bloodshed but because of a lack of interest.

Tom Hansen, the group's international education director, said the Ciudad Juárez program was managed by an experienced local labor organizer who knows the dangerous parts of the city and enforces a dawn-to-dusk curfew for students. Parental permission is required.

“I think that Ciudad Juárez is a challenging place,” he said. “You can't send undisciplined students there. I wouldn't send students who weren't fluent in Spanish. People get in trouble when they don't know what they're getting into.”

It is not hard to understand why few students signed up for the Ciudad Juárez program, which is intended to highlight issues like immigration and trade. The promotional material for the program, in the interest of full disclosure, noted, “Currently Ciudad Juárez is under a virtual state of siege.”

In advising students, the Mexican Solidarity Network said on its Web site: “When thinking about safety in Ciudad Juárez, think in terms of major metropolitan areas in the U.S. such as Detroit, East St. Louis, New York City or Chicago. There are parts of each of these cities where the murder rate is nearly as high as Ciudad Juárez, and university students would be well advised to avoid those areas. This does not mean that the entire city is dangerous.”

Or the entire country.

The group still has programs in Mexico City, Tlaxcala and Chiapas State, all of which Mr. Hansen said also used experienced local contacts to keep students safe.

“If you have a professor from the United States who goes to Mexico City every five years and hangs out in the Zona Rosa and doesn't understand the culture or how to orient the students, that will make the program more dangerous,” he said, referring to a popular entertainment district in the capital.

Until the restrictions on Tijuana study are lifted, Mr. Clark has had to alter his educational approach. He plans to take his San Diego students to the border, but not across it, to spend time with the Border Patrol . And he will use video conferencing to allow Tijuana immigrant smugglers and sex workers to speak to the students — without ever having the class leave American soil.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/world/americas/27mexico.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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			Jamaicans Ponder Cross-Dressing Gangsters By ROBERT MACKEY On Thursday evening, Christopher Coke, the leader of Jamaica's powerful Shower Posse gang, was paraded before the cameras in handcuffs by federal agents in New York, after his long-delayed extradition on gun and drug charges. For Mr. Coke, who is known as Dudus, this photo-op was perhaps less humiliating than the mug shot of him released days earlier by Jamaican police, showing him in the woman's wig the authorities said he was wearing when he was captured at the end of a bloody manhunt that lasted more than a month and claimed dozens of lives. As my colleagues Marc Lacey and Kareem Fahim explained: A booking photograph of Mr. Coke, who is balding and usually wears a beard, showed him closely shaved and with a full Afro, albeit a fake one, stuffed inside a black baseball hat. The police told The Jamaica Observer newspaper that a pink wig had also been found in the car he was in, as well as women's glasses.
The man Jamaican police were looking for and the man they say they found. At left, a file photograph of Christopher Coke taken before a manhunt for him began in May; at right, Mr. Coke in a woman's wig that police say he was wearing when he was captured.

Given that government forces in other parts of the world like Iran and Pakistan have tried to discredit male rebels or dissidents by claiming that they hid in women's clothing, it is hard to say for sure if the wigs were indeed part of Mr. Coke's disguise. But The Jamaica Observer's Chat magazine reported that the authorities went to town with the allegation in this case:

“We could not believe that the big don had a pink wig in his car! Pink! We were in shock,” a police source told Chat! yesterday, between bouts of uncontrollable laughter. “We still in shock. Maybe that is why he was able to stay in hiding for so long, because people looking for a man but he was really a ‘woman!'”

Detail from a cartoon in The Jamaica Observer by Clovis.

Chat also reported that the country's police commissioner, Owen Ellington, said last month that some of the suspected gang members killed defending Mr. Coke near his stronghold in the capital “were dressed in female attire, indicating that members of the West Kingston militia which engaged the security forces in battle disguised themselves as women.” On Thursday night, Annie Paul, a Jamaican critic and blogger observed , “In Jamaica farce, intrigue and tragedy remain inextricably intertwined.” Of Mr. Coke's supposed disguise, she wrote: We're told that he was being escorted by charismatic preacher Rev. Al Miller to the U.S. Embassy in an abortive attempt at surrendering to American authorities who were clamoring for his extradition. We're also informed that he was sporting a curly black woman's wig when the police stopped the car and that he thanked them for sparing his life. These are titillating details, but who knows if we'll ever know the whole truth? [...]

Ms. Paul also pointed to a comments on Facebook by Kei Miller, a Jamaican poet and novelist, who wrote that the allegations of cross-dressing reminded him of a 1990s Reggae hit, “ Bad Man Nuh Dress Like Girl .” Mr. Miller explained:

Dudus's place on the very top of Jamaica's Most Wanted List validates him as the ultimate Bad Man, and that he wasn't suitably decked out in Ultimate-Bad-Man-Gear (whatever that might be, we simply know it doesn't include a wig) gives many of us pause. But even before Coke had been arrested, all dolled up, there were reports that some of the slain men in Tivoli Gardens had been, themselves, decked out in frocks and wigs — shot dead, many of them, in full drag.

This strange history of bad men dressing like girls actually stretches further back. Before there was Dudus, there was Natty Morgan. Natty also topped the charts of Jamaica's Most Wanted and had been on the run, it seemed, forever and a day. For a while Natty had even lived across a swamp, and many women would risk the deadly bites of alligators just to be with him on nights while he waited on the police to find him. After Natty was gunned down (having no pastor to protect him, unfortunately) many a woman would come forward to testify that it was their frock that Natty had borrowed on this night or that to easily walk by police and soldiers….

That's why this sentiment of ‘bad man nuh dress like girl' is always kind of funny — because in a country where Dudus and the dear departed Natty could wear wigs and frocks whenever their minds took them to do it; and in a country where any tour of dance hall will feature a few male dance crews who always offer, on public display, the most profound and sometimes magical performances of Jamaican queerness; and in a country where bad men run across garrison communities — one hand holding onto their Uzi guns, and the other lifting up the hem of their frocks so as not to trip, then we know the real truth — that bad man dress however de rass him want to dress. And that's exactly what makes them de real bad men.

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/jamaicans-ponder-cross-dressing-gangsters/?pagemode=print

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Global Migration: A World Ever More on the Move

Gordon Brown 's rant about a “bigoted” voter sped his exit from the British prime minister's post. What punctured his cool? Her complaint about immigrants. When an earthquake shattered Haiti, Dominicans sent soldiers and Americans sent ships — to discourage potential immigrants. The congressman who shouted “You lie!” at President Obama was upset about immigrants. “Birthers” think Mr. Obama is an immigrant.

There was also the Hamas rocket that landed in Israel this spring, killing a farmworker. Not so unusual, except that the worker was Thai.

Perhaps no force in modern life is as omnipresent yet overlooked as global migration, that vehicle of creative destruction that is reordering ever more of the world. Overlooked? A skeptic may well question the statement, given how often the topic makes news and how divisive the news can be. After all, Arizona's campaign against illegal immigrants, codified in an April law, set off high-decibel debates from Melbourne to Madrid. But migration also shapes the landscape beneath the seemingly unrelated events of the headlines. It is a story-behind-the-story, a complicating tide, in issues as diverse as school bond fights and efforts to isolate Iran. (Seeking allies in Latin America this month, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had to emphasize the dangers of a nuclear-armed Tehran while fending off complaints about the Arizona law.)

Even people who study migration for a living struggle to fully grasp its effects. “Politically, socially, economically, culturally — migration bubbles up everywhere,” James F. Hollifield, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University , said. “We often don't recognize it.”

What prompted Google to close an office in China, rather than accept government censorship? Many factors, no doubt. But among those cited by Sergey Brin , Google's co-founder, was the repression his family suffered during his childhood in the Soviet Union before they immigrated to the United States.

One realm where migration has particularly powerful if largely unstated effects is school finance. Political scientists have found that white voters are more likely to oppose spending plans when they perceive the main beneficiaries to be children of immigrants (especially illegal immigrants). The outcome, of course, affects all children, immigrant or 10th generation.

“When you get increased diversity, you weaken support for the common good,” said Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California .

Professor Myers studied Proposition 55, a 2004 ballot initiative in California that sought $12.3 billion in bond sales to relieve overcrowding and upgrade older schools. Publicly, most opponents framed their concerns in economic terms, saying the government wasted money and ran unsustainable debts. Still, anger about illegal immigration was, as one opponent put it, the “elephant in the living room.” School crowding, he wrote in a letter to The Riverside Press Enterprise, was “solely caused by America's foolish open-borders policy.”

Holding all else equal (like other political views), Professor Myers found, voters who saw immigration as a burden were nearly 9 percentage points more likely to oppose the measure than those who called immigration a benefit. “That's a big effect — it was almost enough to take it down,” he said. The measure squeaked through, with barely 50 percent of the vote.

Immigration also quickened the bitter split in the American labor movement. In 2005, a half dozen unions left the venerable A.F.L.-C.I.O. to form a rival federation, Change to Win . (The dissident unions included the Service Employees International Union and UniteHere.)

On the surface, the fight was mostly about the pace of organizing, with the breakaway group pledging more aggressive moves to enlist members. But the dissidents also counted more low-wage immigrants in their membership.

As Daniel B. Cornfield, a labor scholar at Vanderbilt University , said, the immigrants' marginal (and sometimes illegal) status created a constituency for a more aggressive approach. “I don't think it was a split about immigration, but immigration shaped the split,” he said.

The split, in turn, has had repercussions beyond the labor movement. Janice Fine, a political scientist at Rutgers University , noted that the Change to Win unions played an important (some have argued decisive) role in the early stages of Mr. Obama's presidential campaign.

“If they were inside the larger bureaucracy, it would have been harder for them to make an early endorsement and move money his way,” Professor Fine said.

Theorists sometimes call the movement of people the third wave of globalization, after the movement of goods (trade) and the movement of money (finance) that began in the previous century. But trade and finance follow global norms and are governed by global institutions: the World Trade Organization , the World Bank , the International Monetary Fund . There is no parallel group with “migration” in its name. The most personal and perilous form of movement is the most unregulated. States make (and often ignore) their own rules, deciding who can come, how long they stay, and what rights they enjoy.

While global trade and finance are disruptive — some would argue as much as migration — they are disruptive in less visible ways. A shirt made in Mexico can cost an American worker his job. A worker from Mexico might move next door, send his children to public school and need to be spoken to in Spanish.

One reason migration seems so potent is that it arose unexpectedly. As recently as the 1970s, immigration seemed of such little importance that the United States Census Bureau decided to stop asking people where their parents were born. Now, a quarter of the residents of the United States under 18 are immigrants or immigrants' children.

The United Nations estimates that there are 214 million migrants across the globe, an increase of about 37 percent in two decades. Their ranks grew by 41 percent in Europe and 80 percent in North America. “There's more mobility at this moment than at any time in world history,” said Gary P. Freeman, a political scientist at the University of Texas .

The most famous source countries in Europe — Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain — are suddenly migrant destinations, with Ireland electing a Nigerian-born man as its first black mayor in 2007.

As heirs to an immigrant past, Americans may have an edge in a migrants' age. As contentious as the issue is here, the Americans' capacity to absorb immigrants remains the envy of many Europeans (including those not inclined to envy Americans). Still, today's challenges differ from those of the (mythologized) past. At least five differences set this age apart and amplify migration's effects.

First is migration's global reach. The movements of the 19th century were mostly trans-Atlantic. Now, Nepalis staff Korean factories and Mongolians do scut work in Prague. Persian Gulf economies would collapse without armies of guest workers. Even within the United States, immigrants are spread across dozens of “new gateways” unaccustomed to them, from Orlando to Salt Lake City.

A second distinguishing trait is the money involved, which not only sustains the families left behind but props up national economies. Migrants sent home $317 billion last year — three times the world's total foreign aid. In at least seven countries, remittances account for more than a quarter of the gross domestic product.

A third factor that increases migration's impact is its feminization: Nearly half of the world's migrants are now women, and many have left children behind. Their emergence as breadwinners is altering family dynamics across the developing world. Migration empowers some, but imperils others, with sex trafficking now a global concern.

Technology introduces a fourth break from the past: The huddled masses reached Ellis Island without cellphones or Webcams. Now a nanny in Manhattan can talk to her child in Zacatecas, vote in Mexican elections and watch Mexican television shows.

“Transnationalism” is a comfort but also a concern for those who think it impedes integration. In the age of global jihad, it may also be a security threat. The Pakistani immigrant who pleaded guilty last week to the attempted bombing of Times Square said that jihadi lectures reached him from Yemen, via the Internet.

At least one other trait amplifies the impact of modern migration: The expectation that governments will control it. In America for most of the 19th century, there was no legal barrier to entry. The issue was contentious, but the government attracted little blame. Now Western governments are expected to keep trade and tourism flowing and respect ethnic rights while sealing borders as vast as the Arizona desert and the Mediterranean Sea. Their failures — glaring if perhaps inevitable — weaken the broader faith in federal competence.

“It basically tells people that government cannot do its job,” said Demetri Papademetriou, a co-founder of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington research group. “It creates the anti-government rhetoric we see, and the anger people are feeling.”

Still, rich, aging countries need workers. People in poor countries need jobs. And the rise in global inequality means that migrants have more than ever to gain by landing work abroad. Migration networks are hard to shut down. Even the worst economy in 70 years has only slowed, not stopped, the growth in migration. And it is likely to grow, in numbers and consequence.

When scholars get to feeling expansive, they call today's migration networks a challenge to the order set by the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which established the territorial sovereignty of the nation-state. Judging by the wall rising along the Mexican border, nation-states do not appear to be going away. Their people, increasingly, do.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/weekinreview/27deparle.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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For Inmates, H.I.V. Testing Should Make an Impact

James Warren is a columnist for the Chicago News Cooperative.

Cook County Jail is a reminder of how we tend to be prisoners of our prisons.

We warehouse people in dungeons, throw away the key and rarely take seriously even the vaguest notions of rehabilitation. Reports of overcrowding and guard brutality surface, prompting lawsuits and court orders. We let inmates out and, like Claude Rains in “Casablanca,” tend to be shocked, shocked, that they return to what country singers once called the Crossbar Motel.

And that's just with the adults.

The juveniles have it worse, with the juvenile correctional center a testament to incompetence and administrative deceit, all of which forced a federal judge to step in as a monitor.

When it comes to physical and mental health, our prisons have been notoriously insufficient. If there were decent mental health services, the county jail might be deemed the state's biggest mental health facility. Then there's the problem of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, like gonorrhea and syphilis.

You remember the AIDS plague, don't you? Some may assume that AIDS is vanquished, certainly in the United States although not in distant regions, notably Africa, where they have been far less successful in treating the disease. Well, it's still a problem here, which is why one might offer tentative plaudits to the odious county jail, which is at least trying to address the problem.

H.I.V.-AIDS may generally be out of the news, except for the occasional foray to Africa by Bono and other compassionate celebrities. But there is still a crisis: an estimated 1.2 million Americans have H.I.V., and perhaps 20 percent of them are living with the disease unknowingly. About 17,000 die from it each year.

In Illinois, an estimated 45,000 people are H.I.V.-positive, with 3,000 newly infected each year, said David Munar, vice president of the AIDS Foundation of Chicago. The Illinois cases are disproportionately in Cook County, where gay men and women of color are hit hardest, and where the highest concentrations are in poor neighborhoods. While the advent of new treatments in the mid-1990s has made the disease less deadly, and thus increases the group living with it, it remains incurable, as Mr. Munar, who has it, can attest.

According to a just-released report from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , the prevalence of H.I.V. infection is four times greater among incarcerated people than among the rest of the population (1.5 percent vs. 0.4 percent).

Cook County Jail's anti-H.I.V. efforts have been alternately high-minded, inconsistent and litigation-filled. There have been periods of bona fide concern, but budget restrictions have dismantled most testing. Litigation brought settlement in a case alleging that many inmates were given invasive tests without their permission. Voluntary screening dates to 1996, but in recent years, routine offers of such testing stopped because of budgetary and space issues.

Voluntary testing will now return as part of what's intended to be a more sensitive and expanded intake process at the jail, financed with money found by the Cook County Board, led by Bridget Gainer, a commissioner.

The disease control centers in 2006 urged H.I.V. testing in correctional facilities as part of routine medical evaluations. Rhode Island was cited for scrupulously studying this topic and finding that the large majority of the state's prison inmates accepted an offer of testing, with the tests accounting for 15 percent of H.I.V.-positive results statewide.

At Cook County Jail, women are tested for syphilis, given the high rates among women and the impact on newborns, said Dr. Michael Puisis, the chief operating officer of Cermak Health Center at the jail. There is also screening for possible mental-health issues.

Now both men and women will be offered the full range of tests, including for H.I.V. “It's a big change, no doubt,” Dr. Puisis said. “There's no question this will impact citywide rates.”

The jail struggles with testing the 100,000 or so who pass through its intake each year. A new facility and 900 beds are scheduled to be completed within three years.

“It will be 1,000 percent better than what we have,” Dr. Puisis said. Those testing positive will be treated at Cermak Health Center and, upon release, at the county's Ruth Rothstein CORE Center or a community clinic, with actual testing done at the Stroger Hospital lab.

While we await construction of the new facility, a very bad situation morphs into the tolerable. For government these days, that's not bad.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/us/27cncwarren.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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In Oakland, Shootings at Funerals Cause Concern for Police and Community Leaders

It's a macabre trend: In Oakland and Richmond, young gunmen are targeting funerals and memorial services to attack friends and relatives of slain victims, the police and community leaders say.

“It's sectarian violence,” said Lt. Mark Gagan, a spokesman for the Richmond Police Department. “When one side has killed somebody and there's a funeral, you can just assume that everybody in attendance is sympathetic to the person you're targeting.”

In the latest attack, Rachael Green, 19, and two teenagers were critically injured shortly after midnight Wednesday in West Oakland. Ms. Green had graduated from high school the previous week and was attending a candlelight vigil for Damon Williams, 17, who was shot and killed Monday night in the parking lot of Eastmont Mall in East Oakland.

The police said assailants sprayed gunfire into the crowd of mourners. There have been no arrests.

In April, gunfire erupted inside the Cosmopolitan Baptist Church in East Oakland at a packed funeral for a man who had been shot to death at his 18th-birthday party. No one was injured, but the shooting sparked pandemonium. Two teenagers have been arrested.

In February, gunmen entered a service at the New Gethsemane Church of God in Christ in Richmond and started shooting into the pews, wounding two teenage brothers. An 18-year-old Richmond man is charged with three counts of attempted murder.

Oakland had the highest crime rate of any city in California last year and has already registered 40 homicides in 2010. Richmond had the third-highest crime rate in the state; it has had nine homicides this year.

Community leaders say the shootings are a manifestation of a culture of youth that is inured to violence.

“Many of these young people have seen shooting and murdering in their presence,” said the Rev. Andre Shumake Sr., president of the Richmond Improvement Association, which led outreach efforts after the February shooting at the New Gethsemane church. “A lot of these young people are angry, and they're hurting. They have never received the kind of psychological counseling that would enable them to work through that. And hurt people hurt people.”

The Rev. Roy Wilford, a pastor at Cosmopolitan Baptist for the past 20 years, recalled how he was standing near the glass pulpit in April when gunmen opened fire. Mr. Wilford said he was knocked to the floor as members of the church choir fled.

“They came looking for those young people they knew were going to be there,” Mr. Wilford said. “A lot of these shootings have nothing to do with the people who the event is for.”

After members of the news media leave and the crime-scene tape is taken down, congregations are left to grapple with how to heal communities that have become accustomed to violence.

“We got young people killing each other at a rapid pace,” Mr. Wilford said. “Everybody's worried about the violence, but nobody's addressing the problem.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/us/27bcshooting.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Efforts on Bicycling Also Attract Thieves

It has become a kind of mantra for cities looking to encourage cycling through a widening network of bicycle lanes: Build them, and the riders will come.

And, it turns out, the same might be said of bicycle thieves.

As cyclists from New York to San Francisco take advantage of new commuting infrastructure, thieves appear to be taking a growing interest in two-wheeled travel as well, riders and advocates report. The response by some cities and local law enforcement agencies has been a kind of high-tech cat-and-mouse game, one involving bait bikes and radio trackers as well as social media Web sites.

In San Francisco, the police are working with advocates to develop a series of stings this summer using hidden transmitters mounted on bikes. “It's a lot like the drug war,” said Marc Caswell of the San Francisco Bike Coalition , an advocacy group. “We need to get the higher-ups.”

Campus police at the University of Nevada , Reno, began using a similar tracking system in early May to trap thieves, who have been found to operate in small groups. “It's actually a continual problem,” Cmdr. Todd D. Renwick said.

Boston has been trying another technological approach, using Twitter and Facebook to help publicize bicycle thefts in a kind of virtual lost-and-found message board.

The program, which began in August, replicates successful efforts by cyclists themselves to mobilize the bike community online in response to theft, most notably by Lance Armstrong . When his bicycle was stolen after a race in Sacramento in February 2009, Mr. Armstrong alerted his many Twitter followers; his bike was turned in to the police a few days later. Similarly, in New York in March, a messenger recovered his stolen bike just hours after posting an alert on Twitter.

For riders in Boston, the city's social media program has succeeded in increasing the number of bikes registered with the police, but not in recovering those already stolen. Only “two or three” of the 238 bikes reported stolen using the city's social media outreach have been recovered, said Nicole Freedman, director of city's cycling program.

Bicycle theft remains an underreported crime, advocates and criminal justice experts said. The Federal Bureau of Investigation reports 188,698 thefts nationwide in 2008, up slightly from previous years. It is certainly an undercount, experts said, because cyclists assume that once the theft occurs there is little chance of getting the bike back, and often do not report thefts.

In fact, many police departments — including in Portland, Ore., where bicycling is particularly prevalent — said they did not keep official records of bicycle thefts. (Departments voluntarily send their bicycle crime data to the F.B.I., another reason for a potential undercount.)

In New York, where the police do keep a record of bicycle thefts, riders have seen about a 35 percent increase in the number of reported thefts in 2010 over the same period last year, according to statistics provided by the police. But the number of reports was small, 519 through May 16, in a city where tens of thousands ride each day.

“The very first bike I built, by the time I retired it, it had been stolen 33 times,” said Jason Cecchettini, whose company, Bait Bike , began selling radio-tracking technology for bikes to law enforcement agencies in 2002. Since then, the police and college campuses across the country have bought the systems, Mr. Cecchettini said, at a cost of $7,000 each, not including the price of the bicycle, which is usually valued above the level for grand larceny in a given state.

The tracking system is similar to the LoJack technology used to locate stolen cars. However, unlike LoJack, the trackers are primarily hidden on bikes — as well as other items, like laptop computers — to catch thieves, not to recover property. In Sacramento County alone, the use of such bikes has resulted in 150 to 200 felony arrests, according to Sgt. Todd Deluca of the Sheriff's Department, which has been using the bikes since 2004. “When we started, I thought we'd get kids stealing each others' bikes,” said Sergeant Deluca. “But what we've found is that we've gotten some pretty heavy-duty criminals.”

In one memorable incident in the spring of 2007, an escapee from Folsom State Prison stole a $3,000 Foes mountain bike that had been left as bait in a supermarket parking lot, locked to the rack of an S.U.V. The system alerted the police, and the prisoner was caught about 15 minutes later, less than an hour after his escape, said Officer Lou Wright of the Folsom Police Department.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/us/27bikes.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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From Students, Less Kindness for Strangers?

FED up with the Me-Me-Me MySpace generation? Inclined to believe today's young 'uns are blindingly self-aggrandizing and entitled? According to a major new study of college students, you may well be right.

Vindication for crotchety Gen-Xers — already depressed to find themselves the elders in this social relationship — arrived in a paper presented in May at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science in Boston. “Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students Over Time: A Meta-Analysis,” by Sara Konrath, a researcher at the University of Michigan , found that college students today are 40 percent less empathetic than those of 30 years ago, with the numbers plunging primarily after 2000.

Previous studies have tussled over how to define empathy. Is it a cognitive mechanism through which we imagine how another person feels? A manifestation of sympathy? Do we empathize with others purely to reduce our own levels of stress?

The field has yet to settle on a definition. But for the purposes of this study, Dr. Konrath measured four aspects of “interpersonal sensitivity”: Empathic concern, or sympathy, over the misfortunes of others; perspective taking, an intellectual capacity to imagine other people's points of view; fantasy or people's tendency to identify imaginatively with fictional characters in books or movies; and personal distress, which refers to the anguish one feels during others' misfortunes. (For example, “When I see someone who badly needs help in an emergency, I go to pieces.”)

Today's students scored significantly lower in empathic concern (a 48 percent decrease) and perspective taking (34 percent), considered the more important indices of empathy. In a decisively everyone-for-themselves manner, they are less likely to agree with statements like “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me” and “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective.” This is particularly notable since these are considered shared social ideals: people are more likely to say they agree than they really do.

Previous studies have documented an increasing narcissism among college students since the late 1980s. And Americans in general perceive decreases in other people's kindness and helpfulness.

“I'm not surprised,” said Dr. Bruce Perry, a child psychiatrist and an author of a new book “Born to Love: Why Empathy Is Essential — and Endangered.” “But I was hoping it wasn't as rapid a deterioration as this study suggests.”

What happened? “We don't actually know what the causes are at this point,” Dr. Konrath said. But the authors speculate a millennial mixture of video games, social media, reality TV and hyper-competition have left young people self-involved, shallow and unfettered in their individualism and ambition.

The implications are hardly superficial. Low empathy is associated with criminal behavior, violence, sexual offenses, aggression when drunk and other antisocial behaviors. Depressing news. Just don't expect the next generation to sigh over it, too.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/fashion/27StudiedEmpathy.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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A Little More Help for Your Kid

Jobs are depressingly scarce for recent high school and college graduates. Jobs with health benefits even more so. One of the few bits of good news out there is that under the new health care reform law, young adults will be able to stay on their parents' health insurance policies until they turn 26.

Companies now generally drop people from their parents' policies once they reach age 19 or graduate from college or another educational institution.

The Obama administration estimates that 650,000 uninsured young people will benefit, only a small dent in the 6.6 million uninsured young adults between the ages of 19 and 25. For families whose policies cover dependents, the new rules should be enormously helpful.

The rule applies to policies whether they are employer provided or bought on the open market. Young adults need not live at home, be students, or be listed as dependents on tax returns. They can be single or married. Those who were already dropped from coverage will be able to re-enroll if younger than 26. Young adults must be treated the same as other children.

The costs of the added coverage in group plans at work appear modest. A midrange estimate suggests that the total added premium would be $3,380 in 2011; many companies would split that with employees. If that added cost were spread across all employer-sponsored family plans, average premiums for family coverage — more than $13,000 last year — would rise roughly 1 percent each of the next three years. How much of that would be borne by the employer and how much by employees could differ from company to company.

Some healthy young adults might be able to buy cheaper policies on the individual market — if they choose skimpy coverage, with high cost-sharing and limited benefits. But coverage on a parent's policy would likely be a better bargain for many.

The new law requires insurers and employers to make the changes beginning in September, which in many cases means policies that become effective in January 2011. More than 65 insurance companies have agreed to continue coverage for dependents who would otherwise be dropped this summer.

Unfortunately, most employers, who will face added costs, appear to be waiting for the deadlines. At a minimum, employers should keep currently enrolled young adults on their parents' policies so that they do not face a gap in coverage before they can reapply. In these tough times, young people need all the help they can get.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/opinion/27sun3.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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