By offering a cornucopia of affordable goods in stores nationwide, Walmart has possibly done more to raise standard of living than any other company in the 20th and 21st centuries.
A little-known section of Obamacare called the Physician Payments Sunshine Act will start being enforced this year. The Act treats all doctors who collaborate with the pharmaceutical industry as potential criminals whose private financial affairs must be exposed to the world by government order.
One of the great things about living in a free country is that you have the freedom of association—meaning the freedom to choose who to do business with. For example, if your business is using a contractor who is rude and unreliable, you are free to end your relationship with him and to instead pursue business with someone else. But this freedom is restricted by the Wagner Act.
In a previous post, I described how General Motors entered some self-defeating relationships with the United Auto Workers. To understand this complex relationship, it is useful to know how it began.
From Obama’s inauguration speech: “The commitments we make to each other — through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security — these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us.”
A recent NPR story described efforts to extend the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) to long-term care insurance providers. GINA, passed in 2008, prohibits health insurers from taking into account genetic information about you when deciding what coverage to offer you and at what price.
Next year Obamacare will give more than thirty million Americans completely subsidized health care under Medicaid, or mostly subsidized health care under the state exchanges. As the demand for health care will dramatically increase and the supply of medical professionals able to service that demand will remain essentially unchanged, we can expect to experience things like longer wait times for surgery, having to drive further to visit a specialist and even the possibility that no doctor in drivable distance is accepting new patients.
