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It does for less regulated markets, which is why you get those promotional mailers with promotional prices on LASIC or teeth whitening. Medical lobby benefits
by prostoalex 6y ago
It does for less regulated markets, which is why you get those promotional mailers with promotional prices on LASIC or teeth whitening.
Medical lobby benefits from high barriers to entry, suppressed competition (from foreign doctors or medical tourism companies able to fly their customers abroad) and opaque pricing. Uninformed consumer forced to shop locally is rarely able to extract best pricing.
You can look at the annual fear-mongering fairs where medical lobby has been attempting to insert itself as a rent-seeker into kidney dialysis services in California. It's not like those industries are run by altruists, but on TV concerned serious faces in white coats would tell you in alarmist tones how those centers are run without professional supervision and people with no medical training, but when you vote properly, some [highly paid] individual with medical credentials would make things so much better [albeit more expensive in the long run].
- techrat 6y agoFunny how it's only when regulation is involved that it begins to pull back the curtain.
- maerF0x0 6y agoConsider that regulation makes a certain tier of solution effectively illegal. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elq2mnHTFUY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elq2mnHTFUY I know this may look a little dystopian, but solutions of this sort would be illegal in the US and then folks would have no choice but to just go without any help at all. (Save for if charity/gov't step in). Same story with housing. Part of the reason we have homeless ness (or more realistically people living in cars) is because the homes they could afford are illegal. (Hence why somehow they can afford "home" with a motor).
- techrat 6y agoDeregulation of telecoms. Now we have monopolies with no regulatory requirements to provide service to customers. Read: Verizon refusing to rebuild landline areas affected by severe storms. Removal of regulations for ISPs. Data caps. Throttling. Zero metering. Deep packet inspection. Data injection. Opt out (if you even can) tracking. Removal of oversight for agriculture and removal of animal welfare regulations. More contaminated products. More waste being dumped improperly. Like the argument about minimum wage. Wages aren't going to go up if they remove minimum wage as companies are already paying the least they can get away with. The "free market" simply cannot be trusted to regulate itself. The argument that this wouldn't happen in a "true free market" doesn't hold water. Nor that less regulations would make it easier for newer companies to compete: We've only seen the actual reality of such a policy. Less regulations make it easier for existing companies to fuck the consumer over. Regulations are written in blood. There is a reason they existed in the first place.
- prostoalex 6y agoWhose blood was used in writing the regulations for the space program to ensure an exclusive vendor would get the contracts? https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/181469-spacex-sues-us-government-for-secretly-awarding-multi-billion-dollar-military-launch-contract-to-boeing-and-lockheed https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/181469-spacex-sues-us-go...
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoAh another believer in infinite wisdom of free markets without regulation. This is a true believer, few people suggest we need no regulation in healthcare. How far are you willing to go, should we remove fire safety and return to the fun days where entire cities burned down like in the great fire of london. Should we deregulate the nuclear industry and let the market decide which reactor design is best and who should be allowed to enrich uranium