Many people did indeed walk to work during the strike. But that's not really a workable solution if you live on the opposite end of the city from your job, or if you get paid by the hour and walking to work takes you so long that you actually work less hours and thus lose income, or if you are on salary but must be at work by a certain time or face disciplinary action (or perhaps even get fired), or for that matter if you are simply disabled and physically can't walk to work. As for biking, there's the disability issue mentioned above. Besides that, it's frequently not safe on city streets after major winter storms (too much snow and ice all over the place). Besides that, many city dwellers have little opportunity to ride or don't have a place to safely store a bike and thus don't own one. Buying one just to cope with the strike would be a rather expensive investment to solve a short-term problem, if they could even find the time to go out and find a bike to buy when they're supposed to be at work. In short, walking or biking to work certainly wasn't something that people could do "just as easily" during the strike as taking a cab. Actually, the price that a hospital ends up getting paid is in a way rather heavily regulated. The vast majority of people who have MRIs done on them in the US are either (a) covered by private insurance, (b) covered by public insurance like Medicare, or (c) poor and thus covered by free-care pools. MRIs paid for by private insurance have a reduced price negotiated between the hospital and the insurance company. The government regulates the price paid for MRIs for people covered by Medicare. And although I don't know for certain, I suspect that the price hospitals get for MRIs for free-care people is also set by the government. In short, very few MRIs are actually paid for at the hospital's unregulated "retail" rate. Now, you might say that rates negotiated by private insurance companies aren't regulation, but to a large extent they are, since the health insurance industry is heavily regulated. You keep referring to well-off commuters complaining about price gouging, but I can't honestly say that I've seen a great deal of that. Why do you think that all the commuters complaining about price gouging are well-off? It certainly isn't true that only well-off people take cabs in NYC, and even if it's true that more well-off people take them normally, I imagine that a lot more less well-off people found it necessary to do so to get around during the strike. In any case, as someone else has pointed out, regardless of how well-off the complainers are, complaints specifically about price-gouging by taxis during the NYC transit strike are legitimate simply because taxi rates are regulated and it's illegal for taxis to charge higher rates. Bakers, traders, etc. must act within the law and can be called on the carpet if they profit through illegal activity. It is perfectly reasonable for them to expect the taxi drivers to act within the law as well. I fail to see what's inherently unfair about that. I think would be inherently unfair is an buttertion that the taxi drivers should be allowed to illegally raise their rates merely because they are poorer than their pbuttengers.
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