Consumer Confidential: Recession, healthcare and Sidekicks

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Here’s your mail-it-in-Monday roundup of consumer news from around the Internet:

-- Free at last, free at last -- pretty much. About 80% of economists believe the recession is over, and most think we’re marching confidently down the road to recovery. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the job market should stay fairly stagnant for another year or more. At this point, we’re all getting kind of used to the new and nasty status quo, aren’t we?

-- Thanks for playing, boys. The insurance industry has released a report saying proposals to reform the healthcare system will increase, not lower, people’s premiums by as much as thousands of dollars a year. This cheerful warning comes just hours before a key Senate vote on the issue. Insurers had been saying for months that they were backing reform and didn’t want to scuttle legislative attempts to improve things. What was it Cyndi Lauper sang about true colors?

-- Bad news for Sidekick owners, The cellphones, made by a Microsoft subsidiary and sold by T-Mobile, have had all personal data stored by users wiped out because of a computer glitch. Microsoft and T-Mobile say a server operated by the software giant got all surly and erased people’s info. Ouch.

-- David Lazarus