Free Republic

WASHINGTON, March 15 (Reuters) - The U.S. government said on Wednesday it would subject 27 drugs to inflation penalties, a move that will reduce out-of-pocket costs for Medicare recipients by $2 to as much as $390 per average dose. President Joe Biden's signature Inflation Reduction Act includes a provision penalizing drugmakers for charging prices that rise faster than inflation for people with disabilities or age 65 and older on the government's Medicare health program. "Starting on April 1, Medicare beneficiaries will pay lower coinsurance for Part B drugs that raise prices faster than inflation," White House Domestic Policy Adviser Susan...

The price of eggs has skyrocketed in recent months, up 138% year-over-year last month. A dozen eggs now averages about $4.25, due in part to avian flu, which is tearing through poultry farms across the U.S.—wiping out some 58 million birds in the last year. But there’s another culprit, says a farm advocacy group: price gouging. America’s largest egg producer saw a 600% jump in profits in the last quarter... ...“Avian flu is not manufactured—it’s real,” says Joe Maxwell, the co-founder of Farm Action. “But the dominant firms are using that supply chain disruption to gouge the consumers...” ...Overall, U.S....

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Frustrated by how much they were paying for health care, two groups of California workers sued one of the nation’s largest hospital systems. One group secured a half-billion-dollar settlement. The other lost in court. Both cases took nearly a decade to resolve, highlighting the difficulty patients and their employers often face when trying to corral the ever-increasing costs of health care. Now, instead of relying on the market or the courts to keep health care prices in check, California Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to order the state’s hospitals, doctors’ offices and insurance companies to keep their...

The Government decision to introduce minimum unit pricing on alcohol this week has been welcomed by Alcohol Action Ireland. The new law will largely affect alcohol sold in off-licenses, shops and supermarkets. For that past decade, the Government has been seeking to bring in minimum unit pricing as part of a number of measures to help reduce the harm caused by excessive alcohol consumption. The aim is to change dangerous patterns of alcohol behavior particularly amongst young drinkers, who are buying cheap alcohol before they go out in what is known as pre-drinking. This alcohol will now be more expensive...

Former Bumble Bee CEO Sentenced To Prison For Fixing Prices Of Canned Tuna Christopher Lischewski, former Chief Executive Officer and President of Bumble Bee Foods LLC, was sentenced to serve 40 months in jail and pay a $100,000 criminal fine for his leadership role in a three-year antitrust conspiracy to fix prices of canned tuna, the Department of Justice announced. Lischewski was charged on May 16, 2018, in an indictment returned by a federal grand jury in San Francisco. After a four-week trial in late 2019, he was convicted on the single count of participating in a conspiracy to fix...

Virginia lawmakers have passed a bill that would see insulin prices capped at $50 per month, potentially making the state the third to set limits on the cost of the life-saving medication.

Miami, FL ~ Tuesday, February 25, 2020 Remarks as Prepared for DeliveryGood morning.  It’s great to be in Miami and among so many leaders in the antitrust community.  I’d like to thank Margaret [Sanderson] and Jason [Gudofsky] for hosting this event and the opportunity to be here and provide an update on criminal antitrust enforcement. Whenever we prepare an update on our program, it is a great opportunity for us to step back and think about our mission and consider how what we are doing works towards accomplishing it.  For the criminal program, our mission is to deter, detect, and...

Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Friday, February 14, 2020 A federal grand jury returned an indictment against Hitoshi Hashimoto and Hiroyuki Tamura for their role in a global conspiracy to fix prices for suspension assemblies used in hard disk drives, the Department of Justice announced today. Hashimoto and Tamura, both Japanese citizens, are former top sales executives at NHK Spring Co. Ltd. (NHK Spring), which has pleaded guilty and been sentenced to pay a $28.5 million fine. The indictment, filed yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that, from at...

Attorneys general from more than 40 states are alleging the nation’s largest generic drug manufacturers conspired to artificially inflate and manipulate prices for more than 100 different generic drugs, including treatments for diabetes, cancer, arthritis and other medical conditions

It’s a tuna takedown. On Thursday, the Justice Department announced that food company StarKist Co. could pay a fine of as much as $100 million after pleading guilty to fixing prices on canned tuna from 2011 through at least 2013. StarKist, which has agreed to cooperate with the investigation, is the second company to plead guilty in this case: Bumble Bee did so last year and was fined $25 million for participating in the fishy conspiracy. The extent of the conspiracy, and the effect on consumers, has not been disclosed, but that does not change this core truth: the scheme...

For Roberto Dip, the president of a professional soccer team in Honduras, everything seemed to be business as usual Friday morning as he talked to a sports reporter about the new coach his club hoped to hire. Hours later, Dip was arrested on a warrant drafted by a New Orleans-based FBI agent accusing him of illegally plotting to increase the cost of shipping cargo from the United States to Honduras and other places. Dip – who owns a freight shipping company with offices in the New Orleans area and Baton Rouge – is facing charges of breaking federal anti-trust laws...

The more I research progressivism to discover ways to use their history against them, the more I understand why nobody's ever really done this before. Nobody actually wants the answer to the question because it always leads back to Theodore Roosevelt. In today's episode of erased history, or how American progressive historians have turned TR's legacy into the American version of a picture missing Nikolai Yezhov, we examine how price controls, contrary to popular belief, was not first implemented by Nixon, or Franklin Roosevelt, or even Woodrow Wilson as a part of the effort for World War I. But it...

Danish conglomerate A. P. Møller-Mærsk’s shipping arm, Maersk Line, has been issued with a summons by antitrust authorities in the US. The company is subject of an investigation into suspected price fixing along with a number of other large container shipping companies, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The summons were handed out during a raid on a San Francisco meeting attended by 20 bosses of the industry’s biggest companies, says the report. …

As it goes in silver, so it goes in gold. In London at least. In a bid to have UBS reinstated as a defendant in a London Gold Fix antitrust lawsuit, plaintiffs documents submitted to a New York Court last week include explosive chat room transcripts of UBS and traders from different banks encouraging each other to “push,” “smack,” and “whack” gold prices. The transcripts are equally as startling as those described of banks of the London Silver Fix and UBS given to the court the previous day and described last week in this article. On December 6th attorneys for...

Farmers in the U.S. are pouring out tens of millions of gallons of excess milk, amid a massive glut that has slashed prices and has filled warehouses with cheese. More than 43 million gallons’ worth of milk were dumped in fields, manure lagoons or animal feed, or have been lost on truck routes or discarded at plants in the first eight months of 2016, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That is enough milk to fill 66 Olympic swimming pools, and the most wasted in at least 16 years of data requested by The Wall Street Journal....

Over the summer, millions of pounds of Michigan tart cherries were dumped on the ground and left to rot, thanks to a federal board. The dumping means fewer tart cherries in stores which means higher prices for consumers. And while American farmers are forced to keep their cherries off the market, some companies end up having to import cherries from other nations. Photos of some of the dumped cherries went viral. The images troubled many people, who wanted to know why all that fruit was wasted. The short answer is this: It’s complicated and involves government policies. The Cherry Industry...

Oh yes it is. "My parents were just vacationing in Europe (they go often so they're aware of how stuff works). My mom is diabetic and had a shortage of insulin while in France, they went to the drugstore and she showed the bottle of Humalog which is what she uses in the United States and the price in the United States is around $240 a bottle which is charged to her Medicare and insurance and can only be prescribed by her doctor." "The pharmacist recognized the bottle and without having to go to a doctor sold her a bottle...

United States Steel Corp. has filed a complaint with U.S. regulators against the biggest Chinese steel producers, accusing them of conspiring to fix prices, stealing trade secrets and skirting duties on imports in the U.S. with false labeling. The big steelmaker is alleging illegal unfair competition by the Chinese producers and their distributors, and is seeking “the exclusion of all unfairly traded Chinese steel products from the U.S. market.” U.S. Steel announced Tuesday that it lodged the complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission. Normally the independent federal agency decides within 30 days whether or not to act. The case...

Germany's financial regulator has said it won't take further action against the country's largest bank over alleged interest rate rigging and precious metals price fixing. The moves takes the spotlight off a former boss. The watchdog, known as Bafin, announced on Thursday it had ended several major special audits against Deutsche Bank. [...] Deutsche Bank paid $2.5 billion (2.26 billion euros) in fines in April last year after investigations on manipulating interest rates. The bank was also probed for its role in rigging prices of gold, silver, platinum and palladium. It also recorded a multibillion-euro loss for 2015. Bafin officials...

U.S. Justice Department investigates price-setting process for gold, silver, platinum and palladium U.S. officials are investigating at least 10 major banks for possible rigging of precious-metals markets, even though European regulators dropped a similar probe after finding no evidence of wrongdoing, according to people close to the inquiries. Prosecutors in the Justice Department’s antitrust division are scrutinizing the price-setting process for gold, silver, platinum and palladium in London, while the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has opened a civil investigation, these people said. The agencies have made initial requests for information, including a subpoena from the CFTC to HSBC Holdings PLC...