Kudos to the WP for such a good investigative piece. Great job, guys. I've been thinking about this problem for several years, ever since I saw my first late-n

Kudos to the WP for such a good investigative piece. Great job, guys. I've been thinking about this problem for several years, ever since I saw my first late-night TV commercial with lawyers offering quick cash in return for structured payments. It was obvious that these folks were not pitching a financial service for people to think about very seriously before taking; they were pitching fast cash for people who can't manage their money. Taking financial advantage of the cognitively-impaired is a very thorny problem. I think it's easy to come up with some kind of armchair policy that sounds good but would cause more problems than it would solve. But hey, this is the internet, so everybody gets to take a whack at it. This is my take: if you're receiving a structured settlement for permanent cognitive damage, your cognitive damage does not go away simply because you've decided to take all the money in a lump sum. You end up stuck with the same problem, only now you've lost any chance of remedy. So perhaps the thing to do is to make structured settlements a legal requirement of the lawsuit and not simply a civil one. In other words, the judge rules that party X will pay party Y so much per month for so many years and that debt is not transferable by party Y. They're stuck paying them so much, and they're stuck paying them so long. A check must show up each month made out to Y (and Y must have full control over what to do with it) Y can still make bad financial deals, but they get that money every month no matter what. If Y owes a bunch of people money? They can stand in line and wait on Y to decide how they want to spend their monthly allowance. It's not a debt in the traditional sense, it's an order for one bunch of folks to give another bunch of folks money every so often. Probably a lot of problems with this solution also, but something needs to be done here. This is a terrible situation. EDIT: change in text to correctly source the article