I'm not sure you understand what rent-seeking is. Rent-seeking is the deployment of resources by firms, organizations, or any concentrated special interest grou

I'm not sure you understand what rent-seeking is. Rent-seeking is the deployment of resources by firms, organizations, or any concentrated special interest group to pass or preserve legislation that benefits its directly in the short-term and possibly long-term while harming progress, growth, and innovation in that field by being able to bargain for higher prices from people who need those services. In less abstract and wonky terms, it's when you change laws in ways that benefit you directly but harm others who have to use what you're providing. Examples of rent-seeking occur in the beer industry where "regulation capture"--another beautiful term from the literature--restricts, I believe, the sale or transport of beers into states. The people who have established oligopolies within a particular state have access to the market whereas other smaller breweries have difficulty to making inroads on that market. Deaton is talking about the legislation and policies that health care and finance are introducing that protects them from competition with the knowledge that others will still need to use their services. Usually, this sort of rent-seeking is done under the justification that it provides quality control over goods and services being provided which is, to be fair, sometimes the case or atleast a possible outcome. More often than not it is preserve advantages and create barriers to entry to prevent competition from eroding revenue and, of course, margins. It's only business school that you learn about the powers of competition. In reality, businesses hate competition and they'll do whatever they can to prevent it from entering. Rent-seeking describes how that occurs.