The U.S. health system is what happens when corruption goes on so long you just call it the culture. "All professions are a conspiracy against the layman." was

The U.S. health system is what happens when corruption goes on so long you just call it the culture. "All professions are a conspiracy against the layman." was said by either G.B. Shaw or Ambrose Bierce, depending on your reference point. It's a form of business that is orthogonal to producing things people want, where instead it's mainly in the business of depriving people of what they need. Rent seeking is what professions and institutions are designed to do, to create scarcity in exchange for a promise of quality, but somehow that latter part gets lost. Some years ago when "disruption" was the popular idea, I put together a list of vulnerable industries. The sharing economy was an attack on businesses whose profits depended on a regulatory bar to entry (Uber/AirBnB etc.) The list was based on the presence of labour unions and professional associations, using the hypothesis that their existence creates a price premium that tips the economics of their industry in favour of automation, or at least in favour of economic substitution away by customers to a new tech that meets %80 of their need. Maybe we have the technology now to create an economic rentier map that lays out parts of the economy that have artificially propped up rent-seeking groups, as a means to develop new tools to avoid them. Regarding the rentierism of the health business, I've noticed an anecdotal trend among some aging boomers who are rejecting that system altogether, and choosing palliative care and to die at home instead of in the hallway of a hospital, or worse, spending years in a long term care home. The best thing that could happen to healthcare is that instead of seeing it as broken, we should recognize that it looks like that because works for someone where we can't see who or how, and the goal is not to problematize and fix it, but to make it work for everyone else.