91–100 of 595 posts
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"monopolies are able to exist because of some sort of legal authorization or protection" The entire point of patents...
It was not great before patents when a big company could steal your work and put you out of business after you put in the R&D effort.
"Hearing aids cost thousands of dollars apiece, for no other reason than there is a cartel established by government that prevents firms from selling hearing aids without a prescription." An example of how many (most?) monopolies are able to exist because of some sort of legal authorization or protection. Regulatory capture. There are dozens of companies who would no doubt start making inexpensive hearing aids tomorr…
> There are dozens of companies who would no doubt start making inexpensive hearing aids tomorrow. Absent government regulation, they already would be. And with the lack of certification requirement, someone will start cutting corners to make an extra chunk of profit. Just imagine a faulty hearing aid that fails while a person is driving, and the person causing an accident as a result. Good luck suing anyone over tha…
And why wouldn't someone be able to sue successfully?
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Only for billing cost of procedures. It's still a mess. Did you know that hospitals make money by using name brand medications? They will get a contract with a brand, like Motrin, and charge you full price at $8 a pill. Then Motrin will will evaluate how much the hospital used and give them a big rebate to bring the hospital's cost down under $1 per pill. You can literally buy a bottle of ibuprofen for what they char…
I’m not sure what your point is. These contracts between seller and merchant were voluntary. There are other hospitals available should you choose, and if not then you have no one to blame but yourself.
A hospital has even more lock in than the App Store. They can literally legally lock you in.
How about Big Telecom and Big Fintech and Banking? Or is it simply because the rest did not pay enough to the lobbyists?
> (l) To promote competition, lower prices, and a vibrant and innovative telecommunications ecosystem, the Chair of the Federal Communications Commission is encouraged to work with the rest of the Commission, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to consider:
> (e) To ensure Americans have choices among financial institutions and to guard against excessive market power, the Attorney General, in consultation with the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Chairperson of the Board of Directors of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Comptroller of the Currency, is encouraged to review current practices and adopt a plan, not later than 180 days after the date of this order, for the revitalization of merger oversight under the Bank Merger Act and the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956 (Public Law 84-511, 70 Stat. 133, 12 U.S.C. 1841 et seq.) that is in accordance with the factors enumerated in 12 U.S.C. 1828(c) and 1842(c).
> (t) The Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, consistent with the pro-competition objectives stated in section 1021 of the Dodd-Frank Act, is encouraged to consider:Finally, they've started attacking big tech on the privacy front. The whole "monopoly" and "anti-trust" thing was going nowhere. But privacy orders like this are a step in the right direction. And to put the nail in big tech's coffin, congress should pass a law forbidding the sharing of any personal information on any resident of the US for any commercial reason whatsoever. With draconian penalties assessed per user…
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I hope it’s real. We need modern anti trust laws, big tech is out of control. You’re right though.. sadly. Most importantly, we need to get money out of politics to free our government from the grips of these corporate conglomerates.
We must free ourselves from censorship.
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Only for billing cost of procedures. It's still a mess. Did you know that hospitals make money by using name brand medications? They will get a contract with a brand, like Motrin, and charge you full price at $8 a pill. Then Motrin will will evaluate how much the hospital used and give them a big rebate to bring the hospital's cost down under $1 per pill. You can literally buy a bottle of ibuprofen for what they char…
I’m not sure what your point is. These contracts between seller and merchant were voluntary. There are other hospitals available should you choose, and if not then you have no one to blame but yourself.
The point was that the hospitals are doing things behind the scenes that are not well known that affect the pricing. In this example, they charge you more for using name brand medication and then get a kickback to make money for themselves.
Take the big tech action: some people support it because they want less censorship (that's me), others because they want more. The same applies in other aspects of peoples' issues with big tech (fake news, hate groups, grooming and CP, privacy, foreign election meddling etc). We can't all be happy with whatever the FTC does to social media sites can we, given we mostly want different things.
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Queue "overpowered OTC aids destroyed my hearing" pushback...
Bose’s hearing aids were recently approved by the FDA, and they’re only $850. The APM Marketplace program recently covered this development and the hearing aid monopoly. The sky isn’t going to fall. https://www.npr.org/podcasts/381444600/marketplace https://www.bose.com/en_us/products/headphones/earbuds/sound...
At Costco you can get what seem to be high end hearing aids for $699 each. The current generation are rechargeable and support bluetooth. This includes the free hearing test free fitting ("real ear", which is current best practice) and followup so long as you have a membership.
The key thing that is lacking is a decent app or api for me to write my own. Oh, that and phone conversations using the hearing aid's bluetooth is pretty bad.