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PODCAST: Medicare’s pay-data dump

We look at what the proposed Time-Warner Cable and Comcast merger will mean for internet users. And a challenger appears in the single-serve coffeemaker market.

As of today, we know a whole lot more about how much Medicare pays doctors. The government has released huge amounts of data on which doctors, got paid how much, for what procedures. The data show payments to more than 800,000 doctors and health care organizations. It includes information for thousands of procedures.

Also, some mergers have relevance to people’s lives says antitrust attorney Allen Grunes, and the proposed Time Warner-Comcast deal is one of them. Grunes, with the firm GeyerGorey, says the internet will be a focal point as the combined company would have at least 40 percent, and as much as 50 percent, of the fastest high-speed internet service market.

Coffee is the single-most popular food item — solid or liquid — that Americans consume at breakfast, according to the NPD Group. And although American coffee consumption has been more or less flat since the 1980s (and has fallen since peaking in the 1940s), one category is booming: single serve. The dominant player in the domestic market is Green Mountain’s Keurig machines and their K-cup pods but Switzerland-based Nestle and its Nespresso machines are hoping to muscle in to U.S. market.

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