Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
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Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
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Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
#2First things first: ISPs
Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
#3> In 1994, at the height of the AIDS crisis, in which I lost several friends and a beloved employee to the disease, 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 partners and I tried to sell it to hospitals, we were told time and time again that even though it was a better product — a lifesaving product — they weren’t able to purchase it. The primary supplier of syringes, which controlled 80 percent of the market, structured an arrangement with a vast network of hospitals that essentially closed our industry to new firms for good.
That last bit sentence me a bit odd. Rather than go into the details of incentives of hospitals and why they would forgo a better alternative, the author just attributes it to "monopoly". If this is true, there is some deeper misalignment with incentives in this industry that won't go away by just removing product providers that control a significant portion of the market. Or something that the author doesn't know about the industry that would make this decision make sense.
Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
#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 partners and I tried to sell it to hospitals, we were told time and time again that even though it was a better product — a lifesaving product — they weren’t able to purchase it. The primary supplier of syringes, which controlled 80 percent of the market, structured an arrangement with a vast network of hospitals that essentially closed our industry to new firms for good."
A market in which buyers are not free to choose better products is not a free market.
A market in which new entrants cannot compete fairly against established players is not a free market.
A market in which innovators have to get permission and pay established players for "access" (think ISPs) is not a free market.
And yes, a market in which economic and political power is concentrated in large corporations geographically clustered in a handful of giant metropolitan areas... is also not a free market.
Those corporations have both strong incentives and the means to change the rules of competition to their advantage.
Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
#5Highly relevant: Matt Stoller in The Atlantic:
"How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul In the 1970s, a new wave of post-Watergate liberals stopped fighting monopoly power. The result is an increasingly dangerous political system."
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/how-dem...
Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
#6Or make it profitable to build shit in this country again. If you taxed the hell out of manufactured imports, and loosened up the regulations that are choking US businesses to death, you'd have less meth-and-fentanyl scourged abandoned mill towns.
Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
#7"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…
Not the first time this story is on HN. I always wondered - why focus on selling to American hospitals which could not care less?
If the problem is universal, pitch to elite European hospitals, especially Swiss. They cater for rich patients from all around the world and if it's a good idea they'll definitely be interested. Later on, when it catches, American hospitals will come to you too.
Or maybe you will find that European hospitals has already figured this out in some way. Tough story, then.
Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
#8> In 1994, at the height of the AIDS crisis, in which I lost several friends and a beloved employee to the disease, 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 heal…
Monopoly says you buy 100% of your products from us at 50% discount or 99% of your products from us at full price. Now someone is offering a better product but just that one product, so even if it was free your prices go up. See Intel discounts for avoiding AMD, or Microsoft discounts for avoiding Linux, or ...
What do you do?
Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
#9Her 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 getting gov to hassle their competitors vs improving their own product.
Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies
#10> In 1994, at the height of the AIDS crisis, in which I lost several friends and a beloved employee to the disease, 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 heal…
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