So because workers have some sort of leverage to bargain with, you see that as a multi-billion dollar company being powerless? They are incredibly powerful, they just don't have absolute power like they would prefer.
They are going to be bankrupted because they are forced to take ludicrous contracts with huge pension plans. That pension bomb is unsustainable and our unions have made our cars less competitive. Toyota also operates in the US, but they do so without unions and are obliterating us on multiple fronts.
The reality is very different from your fantasy unfortunately. Insurance companies have found that it is more profitably to co-operate with the medical companies and pay outrageously over priced costs for hospitals and drugs because they know they can squeeze it out of people anyway. When your choice is pay the cost or die, it doesn't leave people with any options.
Because insurance companies generally have monopolies for many areas of the state. If they had to compete for customers, they would have to either offer better prices or services.
Of course not, you get bargaining power. When you represent the entire US health insurance industry you have the power to negotiate better prices. When individual companies who have no problem squeezing the money out of their customers are in charge of it, the result is ridiculous runaway costs.
That is called price fixing. That isn't a good idea pretty much ever. Think of how price ceilings such as rent control have historically worsened situations and apply that to drugs.
The details would be highly important. Would the schools be obligated to take students who choose to use their voucher or could they refuse students? Because at that point it would be very easy for rich parents to make a donation to a school and get their child a spot while a poor person's voucher is refused. You would then see the exact same problems we have now where the rich just go to private schools and the poor have public schools.
So, worst case scenario, nothing changes. Best case scenario, less fortunate children can go to better schools and schools compete, thus becoming more cost-efficient and higher quality. Don't see why you are against that.
I have seen sources vary based on what numbers they are using. Here is a study showing that between 2010-2016, every single drug that was approved received government funding. This was over 100 billion dollars.
However, I am not particularly happy with my tax money propping up Big Pharma, either.
You are assuming a few things that would have to all work, all the time. 1) you assume that there are honest, trustworthy competitors. If they are all corrupt, which most of them are, then this wouldn't happen. 2) you assume the market would react. Companies are doing shitty things every minute of every day all across america. the "market" hears about a teeny tiny percentage of them. And even if the "market" hears about them, they can only react to so many stories. If there are 10's of thousands of companies doing shitty things every day, only a tiny percentage of those are going to receive significant blow back from them. It is much more profitable to be crooked. And if you get caught, you apologize, maybe pay off a few lawsuits for grieving families, then go right back to doing it again.
The market cannot ever, under any circumstances, force companies to stop being assholes. They will continuous screw people over as frequently and as severely as the possibly can. You can punish a few of them for these actions. but people's attention spans are too short and there are just too many cases for it to ever be effective. The much better plan is to have strict regulations and laws in place that will severely punish them if they do shitty things.
That would depend. Conservative economics is all about competition and reducing barriers of entry into the market. It is very unlikely that there would be no person who was honest. The market does react. After the whole hot coffee McDonald's lawsuit, guess what? They changed their policies on coffee. That is why in lawsuits, there is this wonderful thing called "punitive damages" where you can sue for extra as a deterrent for that company and other companies to engage in unethical behavior. If you continuously engage in unethical behavior (as was the case with McDonald's), you are much more likely to receive punitive damages. The bottom line is what counts, yes, but bad publicity and enormous lawsuits hurt the bottom line drastically.
Regulations are a very nuanced topic, and I am not sure that making them "strict" just for the sake of it is a good idea. That is how you get low-competition markets that fail, lots of people lose their jobs, "government needs to step in".
General electric is a massive multinational conglomerate. They are reported to be the 4th largest corporate polluter in america. They have massive holdings in oil and chemicals. They have on many occasions been found to have caused massive contamination including one time they dumped more than 100,000 tons of chemicals from their plant in Waterford, New York.
They invest in green energy with one hand to get some good publicity, while massively investing in pollution, poison and death with the other. This is a perfect example why "the market" can never hold these companies accountable. They will us their massive resources to publicize the handful of good things they do, while making huge amounts of money exploiting people and spreading poison. But that money buys alot of good headlines.
They are by no means perfect, but they have massively invested in turbine technology and other forms of renewable energy. They have also decreased their carbon emissions from their early 2000's levels despite their rapid expansion during that time.
