Reply #9: There does need to be a ....

[gleaner]

moratorium on foreclosures, and the banking industry as a whole needs to be much more tightly regulated.

Let me tell you what Chase Manhattan did to my husband and I. Last year my husband nearly died from MRSA, an antibiotic resistant bacterial disease. He was 14 weeks in the hospital with the trusty private insurance that Obama is touting and when he came out we owed literally thousands of dollars in co-payments, deductibles, and services that the the insurance company simply refused to pay for even though they were covered.

My husband came home with serious damage to his heart after two surgeries. One replaced a destroyed heart valve, and the other implanted an ICD, a device to keep his heart in rhythm and fibrillate it if it goes out of rhythm. He has to spend much of his day in a hospital bed and sleep in a semi sitting position wearing an oxygen mask in order to breathe while he is asleep.

His kidneys were damaged, his lungs, his liver and his bone marrow. His blood values have never returned to normal. His vision has changed radically and the MRSA took away his ability to walk as he used to. He can now walk only short distances even with a walker.

During this time Chase Manhattan acquired the banking chain where our accounts are held. We had been planning to pay the money we owed in medical costs by tapping our home equity, but like many others in this economy we found that the value of our home had plummeted. What had been a safe equity had evaporated and we were more or less paying rent to Chase Manhattan.

My husband had to take a whole galaxy of medication to deal with his new medical conditions. Inflation hit our area hard and we began struggling. We fell behind one month in our mortgage and sometimes had to hit one of our zero balance accounts and depend on the overdraft protection that the bank before Chase Manhattan had extended us. That was the only way we could get by.

Yesterday we attempted to pay our mortgage payment that way and found that Chase had cut off the overdraft protection without warning or explanation. When we called them they said they would be happy to reinstate it if we applied for a line of credit which had a rate of interest that could only be described as usurious. We had deliberately avoided credit cards or lines of credit because of the predatory lending practices of both the banks and the credit card industry. We explained that we couldn't afford what they were asking of us, that we had no money to deal with extra expense, and that our credit reports were probably not any good anymore because of unpaid medical bills. We told them we were desperate and begged for a one month payment holiday with the payment to be added to the end of the mortgage, a common practice in reputable banks. They refused and kept pushing the credit.

We were mouse trapped but good. I was finally able to beg enough money from a relative to catch the mortgage up and keep us above water this time, but I don't know how it is going to turn out. I thank you for taking the time to read this post, and please avoid Chase Manhattan. I always knew they were crooked, but this is so blatant I don't have words to describe it. It is like, "let's go force the customers to have credit they don't want and which will sink them for sure."

I'm calling the Senate Banking Committee to tell them about this and to point out that Chase lied in its news releases promising customer relief. Once again just when I thought I was free of him, George Bush's fingers are closing around my throat. He was the one who made the decision to close my former banking chain. They were struggling but they were solvent, and his banking commission ordered them to close so that his friend and contributor Chase Manhattan could step in and acquire their assets for pennies on the dollar. Unfortunately for me, my husband and I were a part of those assets.