SUNDAY, APRIL 11, 2010
PERSONAL FINANCE
PayPal plan could simplify small-change transactions
by Laura Kennedy
Online and mobile commerce is about
to get a shot in the arm. Online payment service PayPal is opening the door to widespread use of credit and debit cards for micropayments — as small as half a buck and up to about $12. Instead of charging retailers for each card transaction they handle, the company plans to aggregate micropayments and levy a single fee for the bundle. Cheap processing of micropayments is hailed as the answer to many sellers’ prayers. Publishers, for example, have bemoaned the inability to sell newspaper or magazine articles or other content online in a cost-effective way. Until now, print media haven’t been able to find a business model to sell content online, says George Peabody, of Mercator Advisory Group, a payments and banking consulting firm. Jason Pavona, sales and marketing
executive for Litle, which provides payment management services, agrees, noting that efforts such as PayPal’s could help media companies develop a new business. Other purveyors of print could benefit, too — authors could sell chapters of their books as one-offs, for example. Cheaper processing also will probably
pay off for industries that already use micropayments, such as online gaming companies, ringtone merchants and smartphone application marketplaces. Social media and gaming firms are among those exploring ways to process micropayments more cheaply to support their industries. Others that could benefit: the thousands of craftspeople and other individual entrepreneurs who sell low-value goods — on Etsy or other
electronic marketplaces. “The absence of a simple, secure low-cost payment solution has been suppressing new business models, particularly in e-commerce and the nascent m-commerce [mobile commerce] market,” says Conrad Sheehan, founder and chief executive of mPayy, a payments provider. By routing mobile transactions through automated clearinghouses instead of requiring credit and debit cards, mPayy is able to process mobile transactions at low cost to merchants. The cheaper processing fees might even
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analysis.
You ask, ‘Where’s my refund?’ We ask, ‘Why is it so big?’
by Cameron Huddleston
Yes, some of you probably filled out your forms when you received your W-2 and other documents to get your refund as soon as possible. But plenty of us wait until the last minute to file our tax returns. If you filed a paper return, you should be able to check the status of your refund by using the “Where’s My Refund” tool at IRS.gov. Taxpayers who file
electronically can get a status update as soon as three days after the IRS acknowledges receipt of their e-filed return. For those of you filing at the last minute, the fastest way to get your refund is to have it directly
deposited into your checking or savings account. You can do so by providing your account information on your Form 1040. Last year, the total amount
refunded to individual taxpayers broke the $300 billion mark for the first time. More than 110 million taxpayers received refunds averaging $2,753. Now is a good time to think about seeing what you can add to your paycheck by adjusting your withholding. Sure, it feels great to get a big check you can use to pay down debt, fund a vacation or add to a retirement account. But it means you’re handing over too much money to Uncle Sam — money you could use each month to pay bills, buy groceries, invest in stocks or whatever.
— Kiplinger’s Personal Finance
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foster the development of a “microservice” industry. Businesses could begin to charge for services that were previously free, once there’s a feasible and cost-effective way to charge for them, says Brian Shniderman, a director with Deloitte Consulting’s banking team. Restaurant patrons might be willing to
pay a dollar or two, using their cellphones, to head to the front of the queue at a popular restaurant, for example — a high-tech way of greasing the palm of the headwaiter. Or at a bricks-and-mortar retailer, customers might be able to skip long lines. Hurried shoppers might be directed to a designated register or an open self-checkout kiosk or even be able to do the transaction on their phones.
— Kiplinger’s Personal Finance
Weekends and payment deadlines
Some card companies accept
by Kimberly Lankford
Q: I know that the new credit
card law changed the rules about when the bills are due. What happens if my due date falls on a weekend?
A: Your payment will now be due on the same day every month, which makes it easy to keep track of the deadline. The law also specifies that if the due date falls on a day that the card company does not process payments, you have until 5 p.m. the following business day for the issuer to post your payment without it being considered late.
payments on weekends. For example, Capital One processes payments Monday through Saturday. So if the due date falls on a Saturday, the payment must be received by 5 p.m. that day. Sunday payments are processed on Mondays. Bank of America and Chase process payments on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays. But here’s the problem: Some banks allow you to schedule online payments only for weekdays. So even if your payment isn’t due until Saturday or Sunday, you need to schedule it for Friday to avoid a late fee.
— Kiplinger’s Personal Finance
teve Jobs got a new liver, the rest of us got an easier way to watch Hulu in bed, and the health-care industry just may have gotten the big break it need- ed to launch into the 21st century. Following his hush-hush surgery last spring, it’s easy to imagine the colossus of Cupertino, Calif., staring at the ceiling tiles in his hospital room and wishing for a way to hop online without having to bother with a laptop. It’s also no
The Big Money is a financial news and analysis Web site from the Slate Group.
stretch to picture him watching doctors,
nurses and orderlies peck away at a bevy of poorly de-
signed, intermittently integrated and just plain ugly devices and thinking there had to be a better way.
So while the rest of the world
texts, tweets and generally fawns over the thing, that’s muted com- pared with the reception the iPad is getting in the health-care uni- verse. Medical-technology trade pub-
lications are getting positively Ti- ger Beat in their enthusiasm. Kai- ser Permanente is testing uses for the device, a honcho at one of Harvard’s main teaching hospi- tals has weighed in on his facil- ity’s iPad pilot program, and ex- ecutives at Cedars-Sinai were ru- mored to have gotten prototypes last year. This isn’t just hot-new-toy fe- ver sweeping the mediverse, though: If the iPad becomes as ubiquitous in medical facilities as the iPod is everywhere else, it could usher in billions of dollars in savings, according to Black- ford Middleton, chairman of the Center for Information Technol- ogy Leadership and corporate di- rector of Clinical Informatics Re- search & Development at Part- ners HealthCare System. The new Patient Protection
and Affordable Care Act created an urgency to make providing and managing health care more affordable, with the White House pointing to Congressional Budget Office predictions that 25 percent of our gross domestic product would go toward health care in
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The iPad may just revolutionize medicine
S
by Martha C. White
2025 if the status quo persisted. Digitization and interconnectiv- ity between medical facilities is widely viewed as one major way to generate those efficiencies. A recently published report from PricewaterhouseCoopers points out that health care is “playing catch-up” when it comes to innovation, especially techno- logical. It says the ubiquity of wireless mobile devices such as smartphones creates both an op- portunity and a need for medical practitioners to overhaul how they deliver medical care. When health-care pros talk about the iPad, one phrase that crops up often is “form factor.” The iPad’s pretty. At a pound and a half, it’s lightweight compared with most netbooks, fast and can plug along for up to 10 hours on a charge. It’s easy to read, and it’s intuitive to use. This is Apple’s se- cret sauce, and it might lead to the tipping point here. The iPad’s superb visual qual-
ity makes it a natural for reading such diagnostic images as patient X-rays and MRIs, according to Gerard Nussbaum, director of technology services at consulting firm Kurt Salmon Associates. Its big, bright touch screen is a mas- sive improvement over illegible paper charts or chunky desktop computers when it comes to re- cording and reviewing patient data. It’s not that no one has tried to bring medicine into the YouTube age; it’s just that no one has suc- ceeded on a grand scale. Devel- opers have created medical iPhone apps for doctors as well as for consumers, but that device’s
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small screen size can make the apps a hassle to use. If a doctor wanted to compare two EKGs, for instance, it would entail a lot of scrolling and zooming. The federal government has
devoted roughly $19 billion in stimulus funds to digitizing med- ical records, but the initiative has gotten off to a slow start. There are already plenty of vendors in the medical IT space, and even a handful of mobile or handheld devices on the market, but none of them has achieved critical mass. They’re generally more cumbersome to use and cost two to three times as much as an iPad. Health-care experts like John
Halamka, chief information offi- cer Harvard Medical School, say the combination of lower hard- ware acquisition costs and rela- tive lack of a learning curve (since many people already have smartphones) could foster wide- spread adoption of the iPad in health-care settings and pave the way for electronic health records to become the norm. The potential savings are huge.
Implementation would clear up a lot of the errors and redundant testing that currently plague medicine, an improvement that the Center for IT Leadership esti- mates could save $44 billion a year.
The iPad’s not without its
flaws. For starters, it’s fragile. In a rough-and-tumble emergency room, it would be dropped, scratched and generally abused. But aftermarket products like a rubberized skin and a hand strap could be developed that would protect it, Harvard’s Halamka pointed out. Early reviews indicate that
touch-typists may be frustrated by the iPad’s smallish keyboard, but voice-recognition software would let doctors dictate notes. Another issue is that privacy reg- ulations and rules for prescribing controlled substances require added security. Some have sug- gested that a biometric device such as a fingerprint scanner could be added to later versions. These are all relatively small steps, though, given what Apple’s already managed to deliver: a reasonably lightweight, user- friendly, power-sipping link be- tween a doctor and the rest of the medical universe. While the jury’s still out on the iPad’s ap- peal to the status-updating mass- es, it appears to be the booster shot the health-care industry needs.
— The Big Money
Martha C. White is a freelance writer in New York.
Loudoun opposes move by owner of retirement homes to exit bankruptcy
Erickson plan could prevent collection of taxes, officials say
by David S. Hilzenrath
The Loudoun County govern- ment is opposing Erickson Re- tirement Communities’ effort to exit bankruptcy. The county is arguing that Erickson’s reorganization plan could prevent the local govern- ment from collecting property taxes of more than $511,413 and related charges of $1.2 million. Erickson, a Baltimore-based
developer of retirement cam- puses, manages 20 communi- ties around the country, includ- ing Ashby Ponds in Ashburn. The company has been operat- ing under bankruptcy protec- tion since the fall, when it suc- cumbed to a weak real estate market and heavy borrowing. Erickson has been aiming to
emerge from bankruptcy this month, before an investment firm’s deal to buy the company for $365 million expires. In a
court hearing last month, an at- torney for Erickson said the company needed to close the sale by April 30. In a court filing Friday, Lou- doun said the company’s reor- ganization plan does not reflect that the county is entitled to payment ahead of other credi- tors. It appears that “the Debtors are seeking to impair the claims of, and avoid the taxes owed to, numerous localities, including the County,” Loudoun said in its court filing. The reorganization plan, a
document that spells out how money will be distributed to creditors, gives Erickson “un- fettered discretion” as to the treatment of Loudoun’s claim, the county said. The city of Overland Park and
a county government in Kansas have recently raised similar ob- jections. Overland Park alleged that Erickson is seeking to avoid taxes owed to numerous local authorities. An Erickson spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
hilzenrath@washpost.com
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