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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (9649)	9/21/2009 12:33:03 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

I said usually not always. It is really true that its usually the case. I can't comment on your specific industry because you give no details. As for CVS and Walgreens, there are other drug store companies. I just did a quick search and I get pages of results, near me. Even excluding duplicates (there are multiple CVSs for example) there are at least several different drug store companies that are really close and dozens in my county. Is it textbook perfect competition? No, not even in a wealthy high population county like mine, let alone in some small rural town, but competition and potential for competition has a powerful effect here. The current market is an in state market, and from what I understand there are one or two big players in each market. Its more like one or two big companies dominate the market not, that they have all of the market, and that's only in some states, not in every state. Also that ignores the self insurance option which some individuals and apparently quite a few companies use (I didn't know about that later bit until it was posted here). Still there may be a problem with inadequate competition, nothing like what a protected monopoly would give, but still something of a problem, that's why I would like interstate sales. but you are centralizing authority. It will still have to be regulated, and it will be Congress doing the regulating. You can allow interstate sales without centralizing authority. Allow each state to deal with the companies, and individuals to buy from any state. It may be more often than you think. Such statements are typically true about anything like this, but it works both ways. Competitive forces may be (and I submit are) far more powerful in the US than you seem to think, esp. if your not talking about where they are limited directly or indirectly by government action (unfortunately such action is common, and even strong cases of it aren't rare, and this is a problem). Even things considered the textbook cases of monopolies often had less abuse than might be commonly thought. For example the old standard oil decreased the price of oil by a lot, its market share figures may suggest that it was a monopoly (using the term loosely), or near monopoly (if you use the term in its strongest sense) but apparently it could not maintain the position without being somewhat responses to customers, and in the end it was losing market share before the breakup. If it was a monopoly it wasn't a protected monopoly the way government favored companies, and particularly government itself is. But considering protected monopolies, while the directly and strongly protected may be obvious, more subtle forms of protection many not be. Import barriers are less obvious than grants of monopoly. Regulatory capture helping incumbents, esp. when the regulation has a reasonable stated purpose (perhaps environmental, or in more recent times "systematic risk"), is even less obvious. Even just paperwork requirements and permitting processes, can be enough of a burden and cause enough of a delay, to give the advantage to entrenched incumbents over otherwise nimble new rivals. These things are subject to economies of scale, and also the entrenched companies often have gotten very good at dealing with these specific problems giving them a competitive advantage. I do worry about competition as regulation becomes more and more expansive and pervasive.