It's just my opinion, I could be wrong

I'm not sure which area of government has responsibility for oversight of advertising claims (Department of Consumer Protection inside the FTC?), but I have a suggestion for them. It should be a requirement that, if you state a value for some product or service in an advertisement, that value must represent the average actual money paid by independent consumers [recently] for that product or service. So for example, if you are currently advertising $100 of free merchandise, but the average amount you actually sell that merchandise for (including all the samples given away for free in the average) is $2, then you're guilty of fraud, and susceptible to large fines. There can of course be some leeway for approximations (I'd say anything within 10% of actual value, above or below, would be fine), but if we're policing false advertising, it's absurd that something be advertised as a $X value, where X is ridiculously higher than anyone would ever pay for it. (Looking ...

[This post semi-motivated by the open invitation from Jon Steward, on The Daily Show , for opponents of Obamacare to provide some viable alternatives to fix health care problems, rather than just criticize Obamacare. While I do think Obamacare has a number of problems and have been somewhat critical of it, he does make a fair point: there are far less people proposing alternatives to address the problems, which are very real. I figured I should take an abbreviated pass at such.] Existing Problems So health care in the US... it kinda sucks. Here are some of the big problems, in no particular order. Cost Cost is rising faster than just inflation, and has been for a while. This is driven, in large part, by the in-elasticity of demand (ie: people will pay virtually any amount of money to live), and the semi-free market taking advantage of it. Another contributor, though, is the opaqueness of cost of goods and services; many providers are less than up-front with their costs, and the p...