The Federal Trade Commission (FTC)

The paper will serve as a historical background overview of how the Federal Trade Commission Act (FTC) came into existence. The paper will also break down the key components for which the FTC covers, such as deceptive advertising, baiting and switching and consumer fraud. There will be examples

It also declares an “unfair method for the sake of competition that affects commerce, and also being involved in the deceptive acts which affect commerce, are declared unlawful.” The Don’s restaurant is rather famous and has great market value. This means that there must be competitors in the market for Don’s restaurant to participate in various acts. The truth will be known once the investigations have been made. Injustice and deception for the consumers symbolizes two separate areas of the FTC authority and enforcement. The FTC has the authority to overtake all the unfair techniques of the competition between the businesses (Macaulay, 1979).

Several regulatory agencies are responsible for licensing long-term care facilities to ensure compliance of laws and regulations. Regulatory agencies also receive and investigate complaints that are related to the facility and the services in which the facility provides (Walsh, 2014). All long-term care facilities are expected to abide by these regulations in an effort to ensure long-term care patients proper care, ethical treatment, safe living environments, and health care reimbursement.

The Federal Trade Commission enforces a variety of federal antitrust and consumer protection laws. The Commission seeks to

The most efficient way for consumers to get what they want is through the ‘market’, not the government, but businesses have more power than their customers. Some businesses can and will use abuse this power and cheat and steal from consumers to make money. Because of this, the government regulates the behaviour of businesses to have a market economy that functions properly. These laws mainly protect consumers against; misleading/deceptive representations, unconscionable conduct, unfair contracts, and unsafe goods and/or services. To protect consumers, different legal and non-legal approaches have been taken.

The scope of this paper is to break down and define social regulation, industrial regulation, and natural monopolies by explaining how they have impacted society and why they exist. It is also the intent to summarize the Antitrust Laws, explain the major functions of the five primary federal regulatory commissions that govern social regulation, and identify three main regulatory commissions of industrial regulation.

What is the FTC? The FTC stands for Federal Trade Commission. The Federal Trade Commission is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1914 to help prevent unfair business practices, deception, fair trade practices, and unfair competition. The FTC’s mission is to protect the consumers by enacting laws to ensure that businesses cannot cheat people out of money and keep businesses from being unethical and immoral. The FTC takes complaints about businesses and investigates them for fraud or unfair labor practices every year (Silbersack, 2013).

The Federal Trade Commission actively enforces antitrust laws to organizations within the healthcare field, including to Physician Hospital Organizations (PHOs). A PHO is a vehicle that enables hospitals and physicians to work cooperatively toward accomplishing several objectives (Physician, 2015). According to Susan Creighton (2004), competitive issues among PHOs can occur when a PHO acts as a contracting arrangement for a network of healthcare providers. The network can consist of groups of physicians, one hospital or several, and also some other entities that offer a bundle of healthcare services to insurance companies and other payors (Creighton, 2004). The FTC states that the core antitrust law principle is that it is illegal for competitors to agree on prices they will charge, except where they come together and integrate in a legitimate joint venture that results in efficiencies or other precompetitive benefits that outweigh the restriction of competition (Creighton, 2004). Agreements that violate the antitrust law can be determined as per se illegal. Per se illegal means that activities, such as horizontal price fixing, or group boycotts, have been conclusively presumed to restrain competition unreasonably even without a study of the market that they occurred in, or an analysis of their actual effect on competition, or their purpose (Burke, et al., 2009). South Georgia Health Partners are an example of a PHO that was charged by the commission on a per se illegal

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been in protecting consumer privacy on the internet by targeting deceptive and unfair trade practices since the act was establish in 1914( Halbert & Ingulli, 2012, p. 253). According to Halbert & Ingulli (2012) the FTC banned

Question #1: The government in its duties and responsibilities to its citizen sometimes needs to regulate the behaviors and actions of private citizens or corporation for the common good. Most of the time regulations are designed by statute but the enforcement of the statues are carried out by regulatory agencies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Federal Election commission (FEC). Regulatory agencies don’t just exist at the federal level either, Federal regulatory agencies like the FDA and FEC carry out federally mandated regulations passed down from Congress of the executive branch but the same principle applies at the State and Local levels as well who have regulations passed down from their individual statehouses and governor's

| Makes deceptive, misleading, and unfair practices illegal regardless of injury to competition. Places advertising of food and drugs under FTC jurisdiction.

The United States antitrust legislation is a legislation designed to break up and prevent the formation of new monopolies to increase competition and societal welfare. Thus the United State Antitrust law is a collection of both state and federal government laws enacted to promote fair competition in the economy. The antitrust laws main statutes consist of the Sherman Act of 1890, the Clayton Act of 1914 and the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914. In combination these acts have enforced the proper rules and regulations that businesses must conform to today to ensure that there is a healthy competition within the economy to not only the benefit of the consumers who utilize these services and goods but for the health of the businesses who make up our market industries.

In the late 1960’s, the FTC was a paper tiger. Ralph Nader, who began the consumer protection movement in this country with the publication of Unsafe At Any Speed, was a sharp critic of the Federal Trade Commission for its lack of consumer protection. Specifically, the FTC was criticized because it relied too heavily on consumer complaints and brought enforcement actions only on a case-by-case basis. The consumer protection movement wanted the FTC to proceed against entire industries rather than individual businesses.

Another example of the increasing expansion of the Federal Government was evident in the passage of the Antitrust Act. Prior to the enactment of the Antitrust Laws in 1890, the Federal Government had created the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887 that was supposed to curtail the autonomy of the local and state governments in supervising businesses (Holcombe, 1996). While these two laws were important in the Federal Government’s increased involvement in the daily lives of the American people, perhaps it was Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 that clearly demonstrated the increasing expansion of the federal authority in an unprecedented way. The enactment of the Antitrust Act was prompted by the need to protect the public from the exploitation of businesses and business owners. In other words, through the Antitrust Act, the Federal Government hoped that it would limit the economic powers enjoyed by businesses. While the enforcement of the laws may have taken a little longer (Holcombe, 1996), the passage of the law in itself was a pointer that the

To begin, the name of the 2005 legislation is somewhat misleading. That is to say, the verbiage, “Consumer Protection” implies the legislation intends to serve consumers,