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Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

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Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#201

Post by paulddraper »

EduardoBautista wrote: post #63
mrgreenfur wrote: post #44

Does anyone else think that nearly all huge companies exist due to monopolies or near-monopolies? MS has monopoly on desktops. Apple on cell phones and tablets. Facebook on social networking. Google on search. I think any market without at least 3-4 strong competitors will devolve into one dominant player who can milk more from the customer base.

Android has a higher market share than iOS. How does that make Apple a monopoly?

A more apt comparison would be Apple (iOS) vs Samsung (Android) vs LG (Android) vs Motorola (Android).

And Apple has the most mobile device profits.

Still, I agree: nowhere near a monopoly.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#202

Post by darpa_escapee »

valuearb wrote: post #148
bluejekyll wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AHCA, Obamacare is definitely better than before, it guarantees open access to many who didn't have it before. A good thing. But it didn't go far enough. It played in to the corporate healthcare system demands by not offering a competitive public option. The so called Blue Dog democrats blocked that, which is such a shame. Far better than anything the Republicans have put on the table. The problem is that we basicall…

Obamacare increased the cost of my families healthcare from $400 a month to $1800 a month, and now my family doesn't have long term healthcare insurance. So please keep telling me how it's better.

Premiums were rising before the ACA was enacted and continued to rise afterwards [1].

> So please keep telling me how it's better.

It expanded Medicaid and gave premium discounts to lower income brackets in states that accepted it.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/sKUm2u0.jpg

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#203

Post by mschuster91 »

WalterBright wrote: post #127
cs702 wrote: post #4

"I started a manufacturing company in Little Elm, about 35 miles north of Dallas, to produce the first-ever automatically retracting syringe to eliminate the risk of nurses contracting HIV through accidental needle sticks. The syringe received rave reviews from nurses, hospital executives and public health officials, a major grant from the National Institutes of Health and robust private investment. But when my partn…

The medical industry, including the medical device industry, is the most heavily regulated industry in the US. It's far from free market.

Also, airspace (FAA) and railways. And the regulations exist for good reason - f..k stuff up and people die.

The problem arises when regulations are not kept up-to-date or the regulators are being outright bought (like in financial services), and that must change.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#204

Post by geff82 »

As someone who loves rural USA and especially Texas, how could we spread the word better? How could we make it more attractive? Do you think there are other possibilities to revive it besides changing government policies? Let us brainstorm about it!

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#205

Post by stinkytaco »

pdkl95 wrote: post #169
mozumder wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your point in your false equivalency? Are you implying that the 20 million people that now have medical coverage because of Democrats pushing for Obamacare isn't worth it? Was that all "talk"? I'm seriously trying to understand your "equivalency" position. Let me know what the Republicans would have done for health care? Right now it seems that the only thing they've done is to actually limit universal health…

> Let me know what the Republicans would have done for health care? "Obamacare" (formerly known as "Romneycare") is a republican healthcare plan. One of the big reasons we claim that our two major parties are approximately equivalent is the Democrats' habit of passing Republican policies. > since they are clearly very, very different There are differences between R & D that are significant, but they are minor compare…

> No, but they're both bad. Yes, Republicans are not going to improve healthcare, but neither are the Democrats. Did you know Feinstein said a few days ago in a town hall that she has no intention to support single-payer?

I don't know Feinstein's motivations, nor am I knowledgeable about the internal politics of the Democratic Party, but do you think her rejection of single payer has more to do with politics than with actual belief? The "public option" was realistically the closest America ever came to a single payer system, and that proposal was largely sunk by Republicans in Congress, though some Democrats in right-leaning states also rejected it. Are Democrats just trying to compromise in a right-leaning political climate, or are they truly the same?

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#206

Post by jaredklewis »

ericHosick wrote: post #113
Qwertious wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'People need to stop wishing for the "free" market. The term is abused by orators and manipulators who prey on peoples desire for a market which is free in the spirit of the word, and deliver to them a market which is technically "free" and horrible.' Don't call it the free market. Call it what it is: COMPETITION. "Free market" implies "I can do what I want", but frankly we don't WANT people to be free to pull anti-c…

> "Free market" implies "I can do what I want" I always though free implied free from non-consensual acts. It's not much of a free market if your actions are non-consensual (1). (1) Defining what makes an action consensual is difficult but doable.

Difficult indeed.

An ordinary American internet user consents to countless pages of legalese in adhesion and other unread contracts (TOSs, privacy policies and so on) everyday day. These days, every website, piece of software, digital service or product comes with pages upon pages of contracts to which the user must consent to even walk in the door. Reading all of them is easily a full time job.

So, no one has coerced anyone into anything, just a bunch of consenting parties in theory.

In practice, getting consumers to throw away their rights and consent to stridently anti-competitive behavior by companies seems kind of easy.

Taken in the sense of an economy of mutual consent, "free market" is too low a bar to hop over. I can see why people don't think that the barebones style of "free market" is very free.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#207

Post by stinkytaco »

valuearb wrote: post #152
mozumder wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your point in your false equivalency? Are you implying that the 20 million people that now have medical coverage because of Democrats pushing for Obamacare isn't worth it? Was that all "talk"? I'm seriously trying to understand your "equivalency" position. Let me know what the Republicans would have done for health care? Right now it seems that the only thing they've done is to actually limit universal health…

I don't believe 20M more people have medical coverage because of Obamacare, that's a lagging indicator that's likely dead wrong. If you are self employed it made medical insurance unaffordable. Before Obamacare I paid $400 a month for a $5k deductible plan for my family. Post Obamacare I paid $1,100/month, then $1,400/month and quit when it went to $1,800 a month. So my family has no long term medical insurance and n…

About 13 million fewer people are without insurance than before ACA, that's a 1.3% decrease in the amount of uninsured people [1].

ACA marketplaces will insure about 13.1 million people in 2017 and insured 12.9 million in 2016. The rate of private insurance increased 1.2% from 2014 to 2015 and the rate of public insurance .6%.

Now, how much of this is due to ACA and how much is due to other factors is really impossible to separate. Almost anything would be pure speculation. Interestingly, premiums on the exchanges are climbing slower than private insurance [2].

Health insurance premiums had been rising for years, probably due to several issues: aging population, rising costs of equipment and pharmaceuticals, administrative overhead, tort, etc, etc. Additionally, ACA added some costs in the inclusion of pre-existing conditions. I don't disagree that something has to be done, but getting rid of ACA is not going to be a panacea.

[1]:https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2016/demo/p60-25...

[2]:http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-obamacare-premiums-201...

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#208

Post by nickpsecurity »

valuearb wrote: post #180
arrosenberg wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walmart. Walmart has destroyed thousands of businesses. Now you can argue the consumer got lower prices, but low prices don't matter when no one has money to afford them. Additionally, those economies of scale produced cheap, disposable, polluting goods that have an engineered lifetime so that customers have to keep buying the same appliance (or whatever) over and over. The question isn't when economies of scale hurt…

Walmart has been a huge boon to the middle class. It's inarguable that consumers got lower prices, substantially lower prices. That's increased their standard of living. You can argue that Walmart hurt the standard of living of the Americans (less than 1% of US employees) who actually work for it. But that ignores the fact that the smaller competitors didn't pay much better, and never had a stock option plan, so the…

When a Walmart opens, it knocks out about half the jobs in a small town. It doesn't replace that number. It also pays so low many of its employees are on welfare. Companies like WalMart are subsidized by the taxpayer. Repeat that across thousands of stores to get enormous impact on economy.

Add downsizing, consolidation, price gouging (i.e. Koch's, oil), and offshoring to get an even bigger one across the board. The Recession was a given with buying power always going down while costs always go up.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#209

Post by stinkytaco »

valuearb wrote: post #186
stinkytaco wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's illegal? Or it doesn't meet the minimum qualifications for the tax benefit, because those are quite different. https://www.healthcare.gov/private-plan-exceptions-outside-o... As to costs, those vary widely by state. This recent article in the NYTimes was a fairly good overview of how policy decisions can affect the premiums: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/health/how-gop-in-2-state...

Illegal. The reason my families health insurance was $400 a month was because the insurer could exclude pre-existing conditions. That's no longer allowed. And I'm self employed. The ban on pre-existing conditions was done either because the drafters of Obamacare have no clue what insurance actually is, or they actually wanted to destroy health insurance. No one is going to pay for coverage when healthy if they can si…

> The ban on pre-existing conditions was done either because the drafters of Obamacare have no clue what insurance actually is, or they actually wanted to destroy health insurance. No one is going to pay for coverage when healthy if they can sign up when sick.

This is what the tax penalty was meant to prevent, correct? I'm curious, what is your solution to insuring people with pre-existing conditions?

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#210

Post by mannykannot »

shmerl wrote: post #178
bluejekyll wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what guarantees this freedom? And as I understand it, it doesn't prevent monopolies from forming, it is meant to restrict monopolies from controlling the market. According to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market "... are free from any intervention by a government, price-setting monopoly, or other authority." The government is supposed to step in to block monopolies from controlling the market, but…

> But what guarantees this freedom? That's up to the society which wants to have a free market. For instance, anti-trust laws is one way of doing it. > The government is supposed to step in to block monopolies from controlling the market, but that implies that the government is intervening in the market. Someone should to step in here, whether it's government or not, is another question. But clearly, if market has no…

> Someone should to step in here, whether it's government or not, is another question.

Actually, it is the central question, because without a feasible answer all you have is a fine-sounding principle that is utterly infeasible.

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