Economics – The Issue Spotter

February 22, 2021 0

SPACs: Avoiding Volatility, Evading Regulation

(Source) The American economy shattered records in 2020. In April, the unemployment rate rose to 14.7%, the highest rate in the history of the data. By June, national debt had increased by twenty-five percentage points since the end of 2019, the strongest surge in history. In July, the Bureau of Economic Analysis found that U.S. gross domestic product fell 31.4% during the second quarter, representing the biggest recorded contraction of that figure. Two-thousand twenty was a record-breaking year for Wall Street, too. On March 16, the Dow lost 2,997.10 points, a larger one-day percentage slide than the one on Black Monday in 1929. However, by August, the Dow had erased all of its 2020 losses and the S&P 500 closed at an all-time high after its severe plummet earlier in the year. There was another source of record-breaking activity on Wall Street last year. Special-purpose acquisition companies, or “SPACs,” have entered the market in unprecedented numbers. In 2020, SPACs conducted 248 initial public offerings (“IPOs”) and raised over $83 million. By contrast, 2019 – also an unprecedented year for SPACs – saw only fifty-nine SPAC IPOs and $13.6 million raised. SPACs are public companies formed for the purpose of merging [read more]

February 8, 2021 0

Healthcare Price Transparency in a Privately Insured United States: Is Patient Ignorance Bliss?

(Source) It is no secret that the United States is the only industrialized nation without a single-payer universal healthcare program. Among the many issues created by the high cost of healthcare, both parties agree that unexpected, and often extremely expensive, medical bills present a serious threat to financial security in a nation where around two-thirds of individuals declare bankruptcy due to an inability to afford medical care. Despite both parties agreeing that surprise medical bills are a pressing issue, there is little agreement concerning what an appropriate solution might look like. On June 24, 2019, the Trump administration issued an executive order requiring hospitals to make negotiated pricing information accessible to the public. In November 2019, the Department of Health and Human Services, in complying with the order, created a “final rule” requiring all hospitals in the nation to publish the prices of certain procedures on their websites. The American Hospital Administration (“AHA”) and several other hospital networks subsequently filed a lawsuit challenging the administration’s authority to impose such a requirement. The AHA asserted that the rules imposed by this executive order would require more administrative positions to organize and deliver the requested pricing data, an increased cost that ultimately [read more]