As Rep. Nancy Pelosi prepares for a showdown in Congress over her Lower Drug Costs Now bill, Open Markets Institute today released The Role of Monopoly in America’s Prescription Drug Crisis.
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Baldwin, Florida, a town of roughly 1,600 residents west of Jacksonville, lost its last grocery store in 2018, writes Claire Kelloway. Baldwin’s store resembles other collective and community-driven efforts to combat rural food deserts, which were partly created by predatory big-box stores. It also revives a forgotten notion that government should provide open and accessible food markets, which were a central part of municipal planning and responsibility through the 19th century.
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This report, published in 2019, investigates an often-overlooked factor behind high prices for medical services: the increasing corporate concentration of ownership, particularly among hospitals.
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Today, the Open Markets Institute released The Role of Hospital Monopolies in America’s Health Care Crisis, which presents insights into how the astronomically high cost of health care in the United States is a result of increasing corporate concentration of hospital ownership.
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In the biggest government antimonopoly case since Microsoft, Open Markets filed an amicus brief in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in support of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in its suit against Qualcomm.
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"Importing drugs won’t bring prices down significantly because it fails to address the root cause of the problem: monopoly," said Open Markets Managing Editor Michael Bluhm in a statement today.
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Open Markets Food & Power researcher and reporter Claire Kelloway published an op-ed on the Washington Monthly on November 21, 2019 on how America’s biggest dairy co-op is trying to become even bigger. Kelloway writes that one critical reason dairy farms feel pressure to consolidate is because milk retailers, buyers, and, processors have spent years consolidating around them. Now, a merger between major milk monopolists threatens to deal another blow to ailing dairy farmers, and its not clear if federal enforcers will do anything to stop it.
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On November 27, 2019, the Open Markets Institute filed an amicus brief in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in support of the Federal Trade Commission's anti-monopoly suit against Qualcomm, the biggest government anti-monopoly case since Microsoft.
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The use of digital technology in health care has enormous promise, to be sure. But The Wall Street Journal’s coverage of Google’s Project Nightingale also revealed a potential dark side to the projects. Ascension, it noted, “also hopes to mine data to identify additional tests that could be necessary or other ways in which the system could generate more revenue from patients, documents show.”
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Google Could Revolutionize Health Care IT. Here’s Why It Shouldn’t, and What We Could Do Instead
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David Streitfeld reports in The New York Times about the grassroots movement to stop Amazon and quotes Barry Lynn of Open Markets Institute on the Athena coalition.
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Ahead of Thanksgiving, Open Markets' Food & Power reporter Claire Kelloway speaks with Bloomberg law about consolidation among poultry producers and how price fixing is only made easier for them. "Turkey, an $18 billion industry, is one of the lone proteins not subject to any publicly known federal investigation or private suit" reports Bloomberg Law "Even though many top U.S. turkey producers, such as Cargill Inc. and Tyson Foods, allegedly sought to fix prices of other foods.
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Open Markets' Sandeep Vaheesan and Claire Kelloway published a piece on The American Prospect on November 21, 2019 calling for a fair labor market for food chain workers. An overwhelmingly disenfranchised immigrant workforce and corporate collusion and concentration define work in food and agriculture today, they assert. Reforming these labor markets is essential.
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Open Markets Institute legal director Sandeep Vaheesan and Nathan Schneider at the University of Colorado published a paper on the Pennsylvania State University Law Review on cooperative enterprise and its place in the antimonopoly tradition. They lay out the advantages of cooperative firms relative to investor-owned corporations and offer ideas on reforming antitrust to protect and promote cooperation.
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"This decision proves that Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Makan Delrahim grossly misled the American people when he said he would engage in principle-based enforcement of America's antimonopoly laws, including a tougher opposition to vertical integration by dominant platforms and network monopolies," said Open Markets Executive Director Barry Lynn.
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“The Wall Street Journal has finally confirmed that Google engineers search results to serve its own private interests and those of big advertisers and other giant corporations,” said Open Markets Executive Director Barry Lynn. “It’s way past time for our federal and state governments to fix Google.”
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“We applaud the nineteen attorneys general for endorsing our petition for an FTC rulemaking on non-competes,” said Open Markets Legal Director Sandeep Vaheesan in a statement. “We reaffirm our call for an FTC rule that bans non-competes for all workers, not just a subset of the labor force.”
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The Wall Street Journal reported that Google plans to start collecting the health data of millions of Americans as part of a cloud-computing deal with Ascension, one of the largest health systems in theUnited States. This comes after Google’s recent announcement that it plans to acquire Fitbit, the maker of fitness-tracking devices, which will give Google access to the personal health data of millions of Fitbit users. Yet, even if Google lives up to its promise not to use health care data for nefarious purposes, a big problem remains, and it should be getting more attention. Google’s growing size alone makes it an ever more tempting target for hackers.
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