California spends billions of health care dollars on unnecessary treatments and services, administrative waste, and overpriced, sometimes harmful, medications. Researchers, pundits and health care professionals have suggested possible causes for rising health care costs, from the cost of caring for an aging population to the price of malpractice insurance. These factors play a very small role in the cost of health care, and addressing them would not change the price of care. Nor would imposing “cost containment” or rationing of care be an acceptable solution. Rather, it requires reducing health care spending that fails to improve patient health. This report focuses on three major categories of unproductive spending: overuse of invasive treatments, intensive services, and hospitalization; excessive administrative costs; and prescription drug marketing that encourages the use of more drugs, more expensive drugs, and drugs with a less established record of safety. (June 2008)

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Consumers often have little knowledge of, or control over, how companies with which they do business share their personal information. In 2003, California enacted the first-of-its-kind “Shine the Light” law, which gave consumers tools to learn about sharing of their personal information. Still in the Dark reports on California consumers’ experiences with using the law to find out about the sharing of personal information and concludes that both companies and policy-makers need to do a better job of protecting consumers’ privacy. (December 2007)

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In December 2004, Chicago-based Exelon Corporation announced plans to acquire Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG), the last remaining New Jersey-based energy company that hasn’t been taken over by a large out-of-state corporation. Consolidation of Power analyzes the risks this deal poses to consumers in New Jersey’s deregulated electricity market—who depend upon vigorous competition between energy suppliers to get a fair deal for reliable service. (November 2005)

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Federal regulation riddled with loopholes has left large bank conglomerates and other financial institutions with too much leeway to share consumers’ private information and too little responsibility for the consequences. Financial Privacy in the States documents the growing concerns that Americans have about financial privacy, presents a survey of state laws that have helped fill regulatory gaps in the financial privacy sphere, and provides an estimate of the economic burden consumers currently bear as a result of inadequate privacy safeguards. (February 2004)

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