How Companies Make Millions Off Lead-Poisoned, Poor Blacks
August 26th, 2015Via: Washington Post:
Rose sold everything to Access Funding — 420 monthly lead checks between 2017 and 2052. They amounted to a total of nearly $574,000 and had a present value of roughly $338,000.
In return, Access Funding paid her less than $63,000.
Rose, who spoke to The Washington Post on the condition that her full name not be used, had just tumbled into the little-noticed, effectively unregulated netherworld of structured settlements.
Traditional settlements are paid in one immediate lump sum. But these structured agreements often deliver monthly payments across decades to protect vulnerable recipients from immediately spending the money. Since 1975, insurance companies have committed an estimated $350 billion to structured settlements. This has given rise to a secondary market in which dozens of firms compete to purchase the rights to those payments for a fraction of their face value.
