On December 3, 2024, Chris Salinas officially entered a nightmare that would make Freddy Krueger proud—a nightmare in the medical industry known as prior authorization. Even I, as his gastroenterologist, didn’t know at the time that this one would become my biggest nightmare yet. Chris has given me permission to share the details of his... Read More
There is much discussion about what Hal Singer has dubbed “Gangster Antitrust,” the extraction of payments, bribes, or other concessions to allow passage of an otherwise anticompetitive merger. Gangster Antitrust can also take the form of conditioning the approval of a procompetitive merger on a seemingly unrelated remedy that advances the political interests of the... Read More
The wealthiest man in the world was President Trump’s largest campaign contributor, thirteen billionaires were selected for positions in the administration, and the fourth wealthiest man in the world announced that the third largest newspaper in the country would no longer publish any opinion pieces critical of free markets. As if this weren’t an already... Read More
Railroad mergers haven’t happened in a while, and that’s a good thing. During the Reagan era, the country witnessed a rapid consolidation of its railroad industry. In the two decades following the 1980 Staggers Rail Act, the number of Class 1 freight railroads in the country fell from 39 to seven. The new millennium saw... Read More
In a live discussion on Substack in June with Derek Thompson, neoliberal pundit Noah Smith called Dan Wang’s Breakneck a “companion volume” to Thompson’s and Klein’s recent bestseller Abundance. Wang is slated to speak at the upcoming Abundance 2025 conference, which is headlined by Klein and Thompson. Given the furious fight between the abundance faction... Read More
Delta president Glen Hauenstein told investors in July that AI-based pricing is currently used on about 3 percent of its domestic network, and that the company aimed to expand AI pricing to 20 percent of its network by the end of the year. This is bad news for flyers, and given the particular way Delta... Read More
Back in February, Rob Manfred, the commissioner of Major League Baseball (MLB), sang a tune that is truly a classic in the history of labor relations in baseball. According to ESPN, Manfred noted that fans are sending emails expressing concern over the sport’s lack of a salary cap, purportedly spurred by an offseason spending spree... Read More
Since the launch of ChatGPT back in November of 2022, what was once a concept confined to Sci-Fi novels has now certifiably hit the mainstream. The highly visible advances in artificial intelligence (AI) over the past few years have either been awe-inspiring or dread-inducing depending on your perspective, your occupation, and maybe how much Nvidia... Read More
Last September, then vice-presidential candidate JD Vance proclaimed in a Pennsylvanian supermarket, “Eggs, when Kamala Harris took office, were short of $1.50 a dozen. Now a dozen eggs will cost you around $4.” The implication was clear—the Biden Administration’s policies allegedly caused egg prices to skyrocket. While Vance was mocked at the time for the... Read More
