Happy New You! Our columnists share resolutions, aspirations and admonitions for a rewarding 2008.

New Year’s resolutions are typically as reliable as big companies’ assurances that customer service is their No. 1 priority. But that doesn’t stop people from making them.

Here are mine:

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I will not give up hope for healthcare reform.

Political leaders at the state and national levels vowed 12 months ago that 2007 would be the year we’d finally do something about the shameful statistic of 47 million Americans lacking health insurance.

So here we are, with the clock ticking down the year’s final minutes, and what have we accomplished? A lot of talk, to be sure, but not much more.

In California, where as many as 7 million people have no health coverage, our Republican governor and Democratic legislative leaders have struggled mightily to come up with some sort of healthcare fix. We’re still waiting.

This month, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles) came to terms on a plan that would cover many, but not all, of the state’s uninsured. It would also require insurance companies to provide policies to everyone, including people with preexisting medical conditions (such as recently diagnosed diabetics like me).

It would not, however, do much, if anything, to contain runaway healthcare costs.

The bill still needs Senate approval. The plan would then go before voters, who would be asked to approve taxing themselves to cover the estimated $14-billion price tag. Meanwhile, the state is projected to run a similarly huge $14-billion budget deficit next year.

Cooking up a healthcare reform plan without first securing the money to pay for it isn’t exactly a profile in political courage. Our leaders might just as well have promised every child a pony, so long as taxpayers foot the bill. Will anyone be surprised when this whole thing collapses at the ballot box in November?

At the national level, we have Republican presidential candidates Rudolph W. Giuliani, John McCain and Fred Thompson -- each a cancer survivor -- heartlessly espousing plans that don’t guarantee coverage to people with similarly serious illnesses.

Meantime, Democrats Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Sen. Barack Obama and former Sen. John Edwards are duking it out for the universal-coverage high ground but have come up short on details about how they’d achieve this goal, how they’d pay for it and how they’d keep the insurance industry from gouging millions of people in the process.

It’s hard not to be pessimistic. But I think healthcare reform has become so important to average Americans that this issue -- as opposed to, say, Social Security reform -- won’t go away as a policy goal.

Maybe 2008 will be the big year.

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I will not accept that privacy is a lost cause.

More than 216 million records involving U.S. residents have been compromised by security breaches since January 2005, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a San Diego advocacy group.

The biggie this year involved retailer TJX Cos., which revealed a breach in which 45 million customers’ data were accessed by hackers.

According to the privacy-minded Ponemon Institute, the average cost of a private-sector info leak in 2007 was $6.3 million, up from $4.8 million a year earlier. Breaches involving outsourcing firms and other third parties were reported by 40% of corporate survey respondents, up from 29% in 2006.

This year also saw litigation continuing over the Bush administration’s practice of spying on our e-mails and phone calls without first getting warrants, apparently in cahoots with telecom companies.

Yet consumers seem increasingly resigned to the notion that privacy violations are a fact of life in the digital age. There’s hardly any outrage each time a new leak is reported.

Oh, people will say they care about their privacy if you ask them -- opinion polls consistently show it. But the fact is, nobody’s shocked anymore to discover that yet another custodian of our personal data has dropped the ball.

My sense is that if we stop demanding a reasonable level of privacy from government and business, we won’t have any left. I also believe that if we don’t make the penalty for data breaches sufficiently attention-getting, companies and public agencies will have little incentive to work harder to safeguard our personal information.

My proposal: A $1,000 fine for every name affected by a breach, up to $100 million.

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I will try to believe that product safety is important to the government and the people who sell us stuff.

All appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.

This was a particularly ugly year for product recalls, mostly lead-tainted toys made in China.

There was a lot of hand-wringing by U.S. manufacturers and retailers over ensuring safety standards for foreign-made goods. But not one of those companies, at least that I’m aware of, said they’d shift all their production to where they could guarantee quality, like, say, back here in the United States.

At the same time, we went the entire year without President Bush filling the long-vacant chairmanship of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. He nominated a top manufacturing-industry lobbyist, Michael Baroody, to take the top spot. But Baroody withdrew from consideration when Congress started asking about his financial ties.

The commission’s acting chairwoman, Nancy Nord, then made headlines when she said thanks but no thanks to an offer from lawmakers for more money and regulatory power.

Commission sources tell me that Bush has offered the job to several people and that each has turned him down. I’m also hearing that the vacancy could remain unfilled for the remainder of Bush’s term in office.

How many kids have to die each year swallowing faulty toys or in defective cribs before this situation changes?

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I will not lose my temper when talking to robots.

I can’t think of a corporate practice that holds customers in greater contempt than the automated switchboard.

Don’t you just cringe when you hear the recorded voice tell you to stay on the line because “your call is important to us”?

If my call was important to them, I’d be speaking with a service rep, not languishing on hold for 10, 20 or 30 minutes.

And what’s not to hate about a system that makes you recite all sorts of information while navigating the various electronic corridors, only to be forced to repeat everything when you finally get a living, breathing human on the line?

My colleagues at The Times are all too familiar with my short fuse when it comes to interacting with automated switchboards. Typically, I’ll start countering every robotic prompt by saying, “Agent,” which will usually get you to a real person.

Sometimes I’ll have to repeat myself a dozen times before the system finally throws in the towel and allows me to accomplish the purpose of my call. By then, I’m so steamed that I’m all but yelling at the poor person in India who gets on the line (and knows nothing about the company she’s representing except what’s in some script).

A good resource in this regard is the website Gethuman.com, which provides tips for slipping through the automated switchboards of hundreds of major companies. I’ve found Gethuman to be helpful in some cases and outdated in others. But it’s not a bad place to start.

In any case, there are few things as dumb as raising your voice to a robot. Like the damn thing even cares.

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David Lazarus’ Consumer Confidential column runs Wednesdays and Sundays.

Send your tips or feedback to david.lazarus@latimes.com.