This was the reason why gas, electric, and telephone utilities were originally rigidly regulated (and still are in many places), because once the infrastructure was in place people would become dependent on it and the provider could freely jack up prices to outrageous levels with the customer having no recourse but to pay.

Clearly the medical/health insurance and direct care industry complex in this nation has come to operate in the same monopolistic way. Rather than having a variety of companies with products competing for customers on price, value, and service (as is the case with cars or supermarkets for instance), each of the companies competes for accolades from Wall Street analysts, which means "increasing shareholder value," profits, (and executive compensation) are the only things that matter to them.

If we are to provide EVERY person in this country with the level of health care necessary to their basic survival, it's likely that we will need to regulate the health care delivery system and the way we pay for health care to largely sidestep the profit motive and the desire of executives of such companies for the outrageously overblown level of compensation to which they have become so accustomed.

Those who are dependent (addicted) to the money they receive from their roles in the current system may need to invent new ways to earn their money, hopefully ways that provide something useful to the general population rather than participating in a system which amounts to a rapidly-growing malignant tumor on our American Society.

We have an excellent one here in the community where I live (2800 people give or take a few). Many of the other small towns in this area do too. But like most other local merchants, they gave up offering credit to customers years ago. They do accept plastic of all kinds, though (which is probably why they stopped doing local credit).

In the good old days when they did allow customers to "charge it," no local merchant had anything more than a flat fee (a certain percentage of your balance) tacked on if your account was over a certain number of days old. They were often also aware of local layoffs and the other challenges suffered by some local families and offered forbearance and even debt forgiveness to those who were in need.

Considering the myriad creative ways the deregulated credit card companies have invented to extract additional money from those who borrowed from them over the past couple of decades, we'd probably all have been much better off if the local merchants and banks were still the ones from whom their customers were borrowing short term.

Or... perhaps the new regulatory board should just return ALL credit terms nationwide to what they were in those gold old days when I seem to remember that the bankers I knew, who were all truly fine, honest, good people, who cared about the folks in the communities they served (as most LOCAL bankers still are), were making plenty of money.