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Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#251

Post by dsfyu404ed »

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…

Using Feinstein as a representative of a typical politician is like using McVeigh as an example of the typical veteran.

The only people who deserve to be compared to here are the people who voted for her.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#252

Post by coldtea »

jpindar wrote: post #182
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…

How does Wal-mart stay in business if "no one has money to afford them"?

That's easy to answer: it doesn't in the long run (assuming it was the only player -- of course the reality is more nuanced).

But it can destroy a whole lot of value (and be the last "business" standing) in the short and mid-run.

In fact as such businesses erode the working/middle class, short and mid-term they become more enticing to it than other stores, since they are the cheaper options.

If a company causes a "race to the bottom" for jobs and wages by selling too cheaply and paying too little, then those whose wages are affected will mostly be able to shop at that place exactly. And if that company is one business upon many that are causing the same issues, then people wont even be able to single them out for blaming...

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#253

Post by dsfyu404ed »

stinkytaco wrote: post #207
valuearb wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 impossib…

Insured and insured in a meaningful manner are totally different things.

It's like measuring productivity in lines of code. Once a metric becomes a target it's meaningless as a metric.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#254

Post by dsfyu404ed »

stinkytaco wrote: post #207
valuearb wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 impossib…

Insured and insured in a meaningful manner are totally different things.

It's like measuring productivity in lines of code. Once a metric becomes a target it's meaningless as a metric.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#255

Post by flyingfences »

valuearb wrote: post #155
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #42

Multiple other comments in here about this particular niche that the subject of the story went into (medical supplies), but what came to mind to me was a similar story about how it's a similar situation with the golf ball market [1] and from many other stories with eyeglasses (Luxottica artificially dominates the market). These are both cases where it's not so much anti-merger/monopoly law that's the culprit, but the…

Patents are government monopolies created to incentivize inventors to share their inventions so others could build upon them. The fear was they'd hide their IP behind factory walls and innovation would be slow. Now patents are used by those who don't make anything and often don't even invent anything in order to blackmail those who do.

"Intellectual Property" is the use of the State's violence in an attempt to enforce an artificial scarcity upon something that is naturally non-scarce - information. It is inherently antithetical to a free society and always ends up hurting the everyman (and society at large) in the long run.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#256

Post by flyingfences »

maxerickson wrote: post #129
MichaelBurge wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm reading you right, you're worried about e.g. some crackpot calling himself a doctor who rubs moonstones on an infection to make the evil spirits go away. An unfortunate consequence of "anyone can start a medical practice" is that the crackpot would be allowed to operate, but the negative aspects could be mitigated by: * Somebody starting a "Yelp for doctors" * The government could give some approval stamp to d…

I'm not terribly worried about literal crackpots. I'm skeptical that "Yelp for doctors" will in practice be more efficient than up front regulation about who can provide certain services. I certainly think there are impediments that should be removed, just not all of them.

You're skeptical it is possible for something to be more efficient than the US Government?

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#257

Post by acjohnson55 »

peacetreefrog wrote: post #9

Her two examples, the medical and agriculture sectors, are two of the most regulated industries around. A lot of these "monopolies" result because of regulation pushed by combination of well-meaning and self interested people and corporations (see bootleggers and baptists). Her examples suggest it'd be better to focus on the marriage between corporations and government, which allows companies to focus their energy on…

Regulation isn't a binary thing. And it's probably better to speak of government intervention than regulation, as the former is more general. We need to cut the interventions that effectively serve as protectionism for powerful interests and reinforce those that provide for a fair market and protect the social good.

Obviously, those things are subjective, but I would welcome a political discourse that centered on how we slice those concerns.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#258

Post by burfog »

stinkytaco wrote: post #209
valuearb wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If is to be insurance then people with pre-existing conditions should get coverage for everything that isn't related to the condition.

Got cancer? Fine, we'll still cover breaking your leg, as long as the break isn't from cancer invading the bone or from cancer drugs weakening your bones. You're on your own for the cancer.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#259

Post by jessaustin »

mozumder wrote: post #60
jessaustin wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ds talk a better game, but they rarely walk that talk. Take just your first example. W's first year in office, he wanted to standardize "civil unions" that would have entailed all the same rights as "traditional marriages". Of course, lots of "conservatives" were against that, so W reached across the aisle. Crickets. Ds decided they wanted to preserve that issue's political value, so it was more than a decade before…

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…

Yeah I'm such a racist conservative that I voted in the primary for Bernie, and certainly would have voted for him again in the general if DNC hadn't been in the tank for Mrs. Superpredator, because he had the most credible argument for something, anything different. Congratulations on electing Trump instead! Congratulations, too, on hypnotizing yourself into really believing that there's no one to your own left.

Perhaps you can't imagine it, but I really don't care about purported "differences" between Ds and Rs. It's clear that both of those gangs are interested in exploring only a tiny portion of the universe of political possibility. (So far, that seems to be the portion that maximizes public payouts to big political donors!) I have voted and will vote for any departure from that tiny area, in any direction whatsoever. If Vladimir Lenin and David Hume both rose from the grave and ran on a ticket together, I would vote for that. Unlike everyone who votes every election for the status quo (NB: that's you!), I am not a conservative.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#260

Post by eropple »

derefr wrote: post #242
eropple wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're given that chance every day you choose not to go elsewhere where the legal situation is more to your liking. The social contract has an opt-out. But that'd be hard , so...

There being no good place to move because every other government also allows these things, is a sort of monopoly problem of its own...

Have you considered that maybe there are reasons for that that don't involve the twirling of mustachios?
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