And some analysts said it is still investor sentiment, not industrial demand, that will dictate prices.
Now many hospital "systems" dominate their regional markets, often allowing them to dictate prices to insurers who pay the bill.
And this is despite the fact that Medicare has substantially greater market power than the fragmented private insurers do, to dictate prices to hospitals and doctors.
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Any attempt to fiddle the system, dictate prices, favor one industry over another or change preferences in any way creates a distortion which reduces the net satisfaction, aka what people want.
Depending on how a change was enacted, that could lower drug prices a little--or create a system where the government can basically dictate drug prices by saying what it will pay.
And even if America pumped all the oil trapped in forbidden areas, it would not attain the volumes necessary to dictate world prices.
Walk into any store in Japan and the raunchiest pornographic magazines, pulp fiction books and heavy metal compact discs likely sell for exactly the prices publishers dictate.
Much of Obamacare is predicated on the idea that when single payers can negotiate prices, they can dictate whatever payment they want and therefore reduce costs.
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No one is proposing that Moscow have the power to set food prices in Kyrgyzstan, dictate wages for oil workers in Kazakhstan, tell Uzbekistan how much cotton to produce, or prevent people from moving from Armenia to Belarus.
But senior energy analyst Fadel Gheit of Oppenheimer and Co. says oil companies can no more control those prices than a farmer can dictate what he gets for a bushel of corn.
The free market, not government officials, should dictate the quantities of goods and services produced and the prices at which they are sold because the decisions of governments officials necessarily will be arbitrary in relation to those of the market.
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Though they have risen faster of late, prices in Britain are still lower than on the continent, where inefficient and mainly monopolistic firms dictate terms to long-suffering customers.
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