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Hello Rapp Up! readers. The New Rural Virginia team has been hard at work on some new ideas and will have some exciting announcements coming up in the next few weeks. For now, we have a new name for our newsletter! From this point forward, it will be called The Rural Angle. And in this issue of The Rural Angle, we bring you important news on the inflation-fighting front. Exhibit A is the Federal Trade Commission’s suit to block the merger of two giant grocery chains, Kroger and Albertson. The. two are already the largest in America and between them they own many household names – from Safeway and Kroger’s to Harris Teeter. As the FTC wrote in its complaint, “Kroger’s acquisition of Albertsons would lead to additional grocery price hikes for everyday goods, further exacerbating the financial strain consumers across the country face today.” You may be asking: what is the Federal Trade Commission? Well, it is probably the most important agency for consumers that many of us barely know exists. Its mandate is to check the excessive power of large corporations by preventing monopolies, price-fixing and unfair collusion that drive up prices for consumers and hold down wages for employees. Unfortunately, because of decades of strong opposition to business regulation from Republicans, the FTC has stood on the sidelines as big corporations have gobbled up competition and turned America’s free markets into a web of monopolies. That has now changed. Under Biden, a reenergized FTC has done an about-face – aggressively cracking down on anti-competitive business practices, like the Kroger-Albertson merger. (New Rural Virginia previously wrote about the dangers of this merger here.) One of the FTC’s biggest targets now is healthcare monopolies. NRVA has previously focused on the number of independent hospitals and doctor practices in Virginia that have been gobbled up, especially harming rural communities. On March 5th, a federal cross-government initiative was announced on “the impact of corporate greed in health care.” The Department of Justice meanwhile recently initiated an antitrust investigation into UnitedHealth, the massive healthcare insurer that has been acquiring many of the very healthcare service providers — whose bills they are supposed to negotiate and pay on behalf of consumers. And the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is going after corporate abuse of medical debt. It turns out that more than half of all debts on credit reports are unpaid medical bills. But medical bills are riddled with issues like wrong amounts, bills already paid, or that should have been billed to someone else. Moreover, medical debt is a poor predictor of whether someone is likely to pay off other bills. These issues hurt many people, affecting their ability to rent or buy a home or car, or get a job. Unfortunately, not all our politicians support this tough approach. In fact, Republicans in Congress have singled out the FTC and its chair for criticism. And conservative groups are trying to dissolve the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau outright. Just why are Republicans taking the side of mega corporations who drive up prices and misuse consumers’ data? Good question….
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