更多"[单选题]Text 2"的相关试题:
[单选题]Text 2 As lawmakers fight over what conditions insurance companies should be required to cover,other areas of health-care reform remain painfully neglected.One major example:How much should insurance companies pay for what they cover?Consumers rarely care about health-care prices beyond what they personally pay for deductibles,co-payments and prescription drugs.But insurance payments are crucial to understanding why health-care prices have gotten so out of control in the United States.A new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine makes this abundantly clear:Hospital emergency departments across the country are prone to excessively overcharge patients with private insurance,the study found,demanding that patients pay-on average-more than four times what Medicare pays for typical emergency procedures.This is not the heritage of sound medicine.This is the outcome of an extremely complicated and disjointed health-care system-and it's not necessarily the result of greedy hospitals trying to milk large profits out of vulnerable populations.Instead,it's the result of messy provider networks-rife with discounts and confusing contracts,designed by insurance companies and providers to attract customers.There are policy solutions to correct this system.Maryland,for example,has long operated under an"all-payer system"in which everyone pays the same rate for the same treatment-set by an independent state agency.Under this system,Medicare pays higher rates for care than in other states,but in the long run,it saves money-to the tune of$319 million-because the payment system incentivizes hospitals to reduce the number of people they admit.In other words,it encourages payment for quality of care,not quantity.Health-care providers have an incentive to work more closely with nursing facilities to deliver preventive care.Physicians also work more closely with patients to reduce preventable complications and hospital readmissions,which have dropped in Maryland faster than the national average in recent years.This innovative approach to solving price disparities in health-care costs is refreshing,although what works in Maryland might not work everywhere else.But other states have also passed laws to reduce price variation in health care,particularly for uninsured and low-income patients who would be most harmed by surprise medical bills.Unfortunately,reform efforts led by Republicans in Congress will likely worry the health-care industry enough to threaten state-led initiatives.Uncertainty-especially in terms of what our insurance markets will look like a year from now-makes it difficult,if not impossible,for states to experiment with different policies.That's a shame,because that's where the exciting and innovative reforms are happening.
The study in JAMA Internal Medicine is mentioned to illustrate that_____
A.insurance payments push up health-care prices
B.prices in health care are soaring out of control
C.Medicare is more efficieni than private insurance
D.lawmakers fight in the wrong direction
[单选题]Text 4 Alphabet Inc.'s most successful product-the Google search engine-may now be its most problematic.On Tuesday,the European Commission's top antitrust regulator levied a$2.7-billion fine against Alphabet and Google for the way the search engine handles requests for information about products.Specifically,Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said that Google twisted its results to bury links to rival companies'comparison shopping sites while prominently featuring its own service,Google Shopping.Google responded that it's simply trying to give users what they want and denied"favoring ourselves,or any particular site or seller."It has a lot at stake:Google has integrated many different offerings into its search engine,including its mapping and travel services.The principle advanced by Vestager,however,is a good one:Giant online companies shoulcl not be able to take advantage of their dominance in one field to hurt competitors in another.Google's argument is:It integrated Google Shopping,which offers links to products at sites that advertise on Google.into its search engine because that gave users quicker access to the information they were seeking.And in the United States,the key question in antitrust!aw is whether a company's behavior hurts users,not whether it hurts the company's competitors.European regulators focus more on competitors,but they really are two sides of the same coin.If competitors are unfairly closed out,the public can miss out on the very real benefits that vigorous competition provides.At the same time,it's undeniable that the public has welcomed virtual monopolies in search,social media and other services in the Internet era.A large part of the appeal of sites like Facebook and Twitter is that so many people use them.There's a network effect for social media apps in particular-the more people who use the service,the more valuable it becomes to them.Meanwhile,start-ups come out of nowhere to create whole new categories of must-have apps and proclucts online.That means dominant companies have to innovate too,or else they can easily change from today's thing to yesterday's.And often,that innovation involves finding a better way to do something that a competitor is doing.The challenge for regulators is to provide the big companies space to try new things without grossly disrupting the market,closing out other companies and reducing consumer choice,which will ultimately lead to less innovation.A good place to start is by focusing on cases where there is evidence of intentional undermining of competitors-where a dominant company alters the platform it provides not just to feature its own services,but to make it harder to find or use its rivals'.
The European antitrust law is similar to its American counterpart in——
A.the goal to defend the benefits of consumers
B.the principle of protecting market competitors
C.the criteria to decide whether a company is guilty
D.the way to penatize convicted companies
[单选题]Text 3 According to the old saw,anyone who wishes to maintain respect for sausages and laws should not see how either are made.Congress has just finished validating that saying by engaging in the sorry every-five-years exercise known as drafting a farm bill.This mess of subsidies and regulations claims to protect U.S.agriculture,not just from the vagaries of pests,crop diseases and weather but also from the ups and downs of the free market itself.Inevitably,the farm bill showers benefits on well-to-do business owners who don't need or deserve taxpayer help under the cover of deliberately obscure terms such as"federal milk marketing orders".It's true that farm income has dropped in each of the past four years because of falling commodity prices,but Congress showered agribusiness with taxpayer largesse when incomes reached all-time highs a half-decade ago,too.Clumsy manipulation by government probably exacerbates market swings.Where is it written that this one sector deserves federally guaranteed profitability'?You will hear a Iot about the need for food security,but it's mostly nonsense:A mere 6.3 percent of Americans'consumer expenditures were on food consumed at home in 2016,according to the Agriculture Department.This was easily the lowest percentage in the world,as it has been for many years.Even in the wildly unlikely event it doubled,we'd still be better off than developed countries such as Sweden and France.If Congress really wanted to help farmers,it would do something to stop President Trump's trade war,which has provoked retaliatory tarif{s by many countries against U.S.farm exports.This year's process has introduced a new level of ugliness to this inherently unlovely law.The House version of the farm bill,passed with Republican votes only,would add a work requirement to the government's largest food aid program for the poor,the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,or SNAP.Helping poor people buy groceries is the main way the farm bill actually enhances food security;for decades,linking SNAP to farm subsidies in a single bill has been the price of urban lawmakers'support for rural corporate welfare.Mr.Trump applauded the measure,which would make most adult SNAP recipients（up to 7 million people）spend 20 hours per week either working or participating in a state-run training program as a condition of receiving benefits,which at present average$125 per month to 42.3 million Americans.Democratic representatives,mostly from urban America,and several Republicans,too,recoiled.Correctly,they cited the bill's insufficient funding for training programs,as well as the added paperwork and administrative burden.They might also have noted the bill's juxtaposition of tougher eligibility criteria for the poor with continued sugar price supports for agribusinesses in the South and Midwest.A large bipartisan majority of the Senate rejected the work requirement,which may mean that it can't survive the conference committee.The mere fact that it has gotten this far,however,tells you something about farm-bill politics in general and the priorities of the Republican House in particular.
The author holds that agricultural industry in the U.S_____
A.keeps growing over the last five years
B.puts too much stress on food security
C.receives subsidies more than necessary
D.needs to boost home consumers'demand
