I’m confused.

Nine days ago, when Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius went before a town hall in Pennsylvania, they were greeted with many questions about the health care bills before the House and Senate. Secretary Sebelius thought the questioners were a bit out of line because, as she said, “There isn’t even a bill yet.”

I think she meant that there is no bill that has passed both houses of Congress, but I’m not sure. When people have been attending these town halls and questioning parts of the bill, it’s usually H.R. 3200. Sen. Specter said there is no bill yet, so I assume he was referring to the fact that the Senate does not have one bill pending in the entire body.

Today at his town hall he was asked about whether any federal taxpayer money will be used for abortion under this new health care plan. He went on to say that the bill would provide two different plans: one for women who want the option to have an abortion and one for women who don’t.

“Well, first of all, we don’t have a bill in the Senate, as I said. And what we are looking toward is to have both options. That if you want to have a health care plan which does not have payment for abortions, you can have that one where you’ll not be charged for somebody who has an abortion. Now, if you want a different health care plan, an option where you can have payment for abortion that you pay for it, because there’d be a little bigger premium, you have the choice.”

It would be similar to what health insurance companies do now with pregnancy. They offer several different plans, some with very good pregnancy coverage and higher premiums and others with less pregnancy coverage and lower premiums. If you’re young and have no plans on getting pregnant, you save some money and get the one with little or no pregnancy coverage.

Currently, the Hyde amendment states that federal money cannot be used to fund abortions. I think this would skirt that amendment because people are paying premiums into the health care fund and then the health care fund is paying for the abortion. It’s not John Q. Public’s tax money — it’s the policyholder’s money. Just as Social Security payments are not made with federal tax money — they’re made with Social Security money. I have no problem with the public option covering abortions at all: whether you like it or not, abortion is legal in this great country of ours.

**Update 8/13: ABC World News Tonight just ran a “fact check” segment on this issue. Their answer to the question about whether federal taxpayer money would be used to fund abortions was: “unclear.” They point out that women would be able to enroll in a plan that paid for abortion, but they also noted something I forgot when I wrote this post: lower income Americans would have some of their premiums subsidized by taxpayer money — so that’s taxpayer money going to pay the premiums of people who use it for abortion. On the other hand, they also point out that there are amendments floating around right now that would require people to pay for abortions entirely out of pocket, regardless of their plan — so that would eliminate the two-plan approach Specter was talking about here. It’s not settled yet. None of this is.**

So after that, I’m pretty sure I know that there are no bills in the Senate but they’re coming up with something. Then I hear Claire McCaskill (D-MO) at her town hall today saying there are actually two bills in the Senate but neither has cleared its committee yet. She says she read every word of both of them and there’s absolutely positively not one word in there about abortion. So Specter’s apparently just going out on a limb and saying that despite the two bills currently in Senate committees that say nothing about abortion, the Senate is ” looking toward” a plan that has both options. Is he being optimistic or deceptive? You make the call.

I’m tempted to believe that Specter is just pulling stuff out of his hindquarters. At the same town hall, he revealed that he was did not know that the government would tax employers 2.5% of their income if they did not offer their employees the public option. His ignorance of what is in the House legislation that is available on the internet is frightening. Granted, he’s not in the House, but I think he might want to be informed about these things. He has to know people are going to ask questions about it.

I’m not sure what these town halls are supposed to accomplish, but I think it depends on what the state of the legislation is — we all remember the Schoolhouse Rock video, right? Either there’s no bill in your branch of the Congress and you just listen to your constituents tell you what their concerns are about what should be in the bill that eventually passes; or there is a bill in your branch of Congress and you demonstrate that you are aware of what it entails and defend your position either for it or against it. It seems that a lot of politicians are trying to do both, saying “there is no bill” and also saying “don’t worry, that’s not in the bill” – and it’s not playing well at all.

I’m glad that Specter and McCaskill held their town halls today and listened to the people who showed up. Some representatives are chickening out and don’t want to listen to their constituents — which makes me wonder who exactly they are “representing” anyway. Message to politicians: we are reading the bills that are out there and finding things we don’t like about them. I know it’s an overused cliche, but the devil is in the details. Either you read the bills too and know what those details are or you look like an idiot.

On a slightly different note, I never hear any of the people who support this bill say one word about any possible downside to any of their constituents as a result of HR 3200 or any of the health care bills (there are five: three in the House, two in the Senate). If you ask them, it’s going to be great for everybody and bring costs down and increase coverage and even triple the unicorn population. Either they have no idea what’s in the bill, or they’re lying by omission. I would love to have just one representative who wants the bill to pass come out and say: here are the downsides to the bill and who will be negatively impacted, and here are the upsides to the bill and who will be positively impacted — and I’m deciding that the positives outweigh the negatives based on who my constitutents are and where they fall in terms of those groups. But they don’t do that. They pretend there are no negatives and hope we’re too stupid to ask questions. Until recently, that was usually what happened. Not any more.

P.S. After watching those two town halls, I watched Obama’s town hall. In the first two, at most 10% of the questions were positive. In Obama’s, he could only find one person who was skeptical. Yet the Obama administration says the audience was not hand-picked. I find that hard to believe. (Yes, I know Bush did it when he was President. But that doesn’t make it justifiable; since when have the Democrats thought George Bush was the standard-bearer for good behavior?)

A few weeks ago, I watched a show on HBO called Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit, and the Era of Predatory Lenders. As someone who believes strongly in both free markets and personal responsibility, I have a problem with blaming the banks who lend money but not the people who borrow money foolishly. While I expected the show to slam banks (and they did plenty of that), it also showed a lot of ways people get themselves in bad financial situations so that people can learn how to avoid being put in a situation where those evil banks can take advantage of you. Credit card companies’ favorite customers are people who have already declared bankruptcy. They know that these people can’t declare bankruptcy again for 7 years, and they have already shown that they have a “taste for credit,” meaning that they’re willing to buy something and make minimum payments forever.

The very next day, a communications student was roaming the halls of the economics department looking for someone to be interviewed on camera about bank overdraft charges. During summer, there’s hardly anybody around and he wasn’t having much luck. He said it was just for an assignment and it wouldn’t be televised, so I said I’d help him out and did some research into bank fees for the interview. Banks took major hits in the last two years with people defaulting on both home loans and credit cards, so in addition to begging for TARP money, they’ve raised fees on everything they possibly can.

Both of those events had me thinking about bank and credit card fees and how people can avoid being taken advantage of, and I have been meaning to write this post for a few weeks now but I felt I needed one more piece of information. That information arrived yesterday when I learned that, in the past year, banks collected $38.5 billion in overdraft charges. That’s over $150 per adult in our economy. Obscene. (Normally when I talk about a person’s or a firm’s income, I say something more like, “Company X earned $Y in profit last year.” But there’s not much ”earned” about these overdraft charges. )

Most of my students have grown up in a world where credit cards and debit cards have been the standard form of payment, but that’s not how it used to be. Two decades ago, you paid by cash or check. If you wrote a check for more than you had in your checking account, it bounced. The bank charged you a fee and the store charged you another fee.

Somewhere in the last decade or so, things changed. First, stores can have checks approved electronically, so you can’t really bounce a check any more. Second, people have begun using debit cards much more frequently. Third, banks decided to offer their customers “overdraft protection,” where banks would honor a transaction even though you had insufficient funds for it, mark your account as overdrawn and charge you an overdraft fee. Normally I wouldn’t have a problem with that. To some, it would seem that the bank is just providing you insurance against bad record-keeping and you’re paying a price so that you can have the things you want even if you didn’t have the money for it that day. But there are two practices many banks employ that make me cry foul. The first is that some do not give you the option of overdraft coverage: they require it on their checking accounts. The second is that they will allow you to go over your account limit several times and charge you every single time.

You should have the option to not have overdraft coverage. In cases where you do have it, banks call it ”overdraft protection” to trick you into thinking it’s a wonderful thing, and most consumers don’t know any better. I know when I was a college student I thought it was a good thing. Then again, I was just so happy they gave me a card that I didn’t bother with the details. I would encourage readers to find out if they have overdraft protection on their accounts and, if you can, have it removed. If you have no overdraft protection, then when you try to use your debit card to buy $10 worth of goods and only have $5 in the bank, the bank will just deny that transaction and you walk away from the store with no goods but you save yourself $26, the average overdraft charge. (Most credit card companies do this as well — allowing you to go over your credit limit and then slamming you with an overlimit fee. You should try to get that removed as well.) Maybe you’re a little embarrassed, but you didn’t get hit with a fee. And you’re aware of it right then, instead of blindly making several more transactions that day and the next (and getting charged an additional fee with every single one of them) until at some point you look at your statement and finally realize what’s happened.

The rise in overdraft fees is due not only to banks increasing their fees, but also consumers not keeping track of the money they spend. People with smartphones can often download free apps for their bank that will give them up-to-date account balance information. I got one for my Wells Fargo account and it’s great. I don’t use my debit card for anything other than my trips Costco, but I check my account with my iPhone before I go in to make sure I don’t spend too much. If you are in the habit of using your debit card for every little purchase you make, look into downloading one of these free applications. If you don’t have a smartphone, please at least be more careful about keeping track of the purchases you make or try to remove your overdraft coverage.

This recession is waking a lot of people up to the idea that you are not entitled to spend beyond your means and you have to be smarter about the financial decisions you make. But this report of $38.5 billion in overdraft fees tells me that not enough people are waking up yet. Your tax dollars are already going to many of these banks via the TARP program. Don’t give them any more money in overdraft fees.