[QUOTE]Considering that electric, telephone and natural gas companies have government-sanctioned monopolies issued by towns, they should be regulated. My preference is to not have the government-sanctioned monopolies and allow the free market to do its thing./[QUOTE]
Technically telephone companies are no longer monopolies since cell phone, cable tv, and Clec carriers. You can also puchase your electricity from someone other than Ngrid or Nstar, and they just transport it to the end user so again not a monopoly. Not sure about the gas company though, but you could heat your house with alternative fuels like oil, propane, wood, coal or pellets.
[QUOTE]Do these seem reasonable to you? I've read that approximately 10% of medical costs are due to malpractice insurance. According to the wikipedia (take the source for what it is) entry on "Medical Malpractice", 60% of claims against doctors are dropped (still costing an average $22k per dropped claim) and 90% of the time cases go to trial, the doctor is found to be not negligent (yet costing an average $100,000/case)./[QUOTE]
Yeah considering my Ortho guy does surgery two days a week, the day of my surgery he was doing 7 or 8 surgeries that day, which the nurses say was average. So he is averaging say 14 surgeries a week or close to 700 a year which at 10000 a pop is 7 million dollars. So that 100,000 is about 1.5 percent of his operating costs. not 10 percent.
[QUOTE]Not even a little bit - and that's not because I think it's going to be created impotent by the Supreme Court. ObamaCare, if allowed to completely materialize, will have no effect on prices while further contributing to long waiting times to see a specialist./[QUOTE]
At least we finally agree on something..
Hybrid Mode
