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TIME-The Market Can't Cure Medicare

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CapitalistSwine

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I found this wonderful (sarcasm) piece in my latest issue of TIME magazine. Thoughts?

Three lovely quotes:

"So many companies will be rushing in to provide health insurance to aging boomer's that the competition should keep the price of premiums from rising much. "There is no evidence of that," says Yale School of Management professor Fiona Scott Morton, "There really isn't. We have many uninsured people who are paying out of pocket for things, and it's not driving down prices."

"But the game doesn't work in our favor all the time. The airline industry is crazy competitive, right? Except that fares have increased nine times since mid-December. You may notice that having 4 (gas) service stations within 2 blocks of one another hasn't noticeably lowered the price at the pump. Cable and satellite-television providers are constantly attacking each other in their advertising. Has your cable bill retreated over the past 5 years?

"Nowhere in the Adam Smith rule book does it say that prices have to come down every time new competitors show up."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2066767,00.html

Edited by CapitalistSwine
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TIME stopped being respectable and relevant to me many years ago. Somewhere around the point where they printed the issue with the person of the year as "you" with the cheap foil reflective material on the cover. Their journalism falls somewhere between leftist chearleading and Entertainment Tonight coverage.

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TIME stopped being respectable and relevant to me many years ago. Somewhere around the point where they printed the issue with the person of the year as "you" with the cheap foil reflective material on the cover. Their journalism falls somewhere between leftist chearleading and Entertainment Tonight coverage.

Absolutely agree. On occasion I find a good article but the internet sites I frequent have a much better ratio of quality articles with better fact checking. Only reason I have this issue is because my family subscribes to TIME and a bunch of other magazines. I usually read these when I am around...in the bathroom, to keep up on what the mainstream magazines that so many people are reading are saying. I just found this article too hilarious (in a bad sense) to not share here.

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  • 2 months later...

I found this wonderful (sarcasm) piece in my latest issue of TIME magazine. Thoughts?

Three lovely quotes:

"So many companies will be rushing in to provide health insurance to aging boomer's that the competition should keep the price of premiums from rising much. "There is no evidence of that," says Yale School of Management professor Fiona Scott Morton, "There really isn't. We have many uninsured people who are paying out of pocket for things, and it's not driving down prices."

"But the game doesn't work in our favor all the time. The airline industry is crazy competitive, right? Except that fares have increased nine times since mid-December. You may notice that having 4 (gas) service stations within 2 blocks of one another hasn't noticeably lowered the price at the pump. Cable and satellite-television providers are constantly attacking each other in their advertising. Has your cable bill retreated over the past 5 years?

"Nowhere in the Adam Smith rule book does it say that prices have to come down every time new competitors show up."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2066767,00.html

I suggest you read the bit on coercive monopolies (there can be more than one - in Canada the govt makes sure things appear competitive - there is always more than one drug store) in Capitalism the Unknown Ideal. If there was no government interference, that is the complete separation of the state and the economy, there would be a heck of a lot more companies competing. I think it is hard to imagine what a true lassaize faire capitalist system would look like. I think it would be completely unrecognizable from what we see today. I don't even think we would have roads.

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