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>Because you do not have to go to those places. Food is an extreme need, and while there are many types of businesses that provide food, we can wrap those up i

>Because you do not have to go to those places. Food is an extreme need, and while there are many types of businesses that provide food, we can wrap those up into one larger class of food provider businesses and ask why they aren't being captured and squeezed. Sure, some are to hunt or garden, but that number is far too small when you think of places with the highest concentrations of people. Food even has regulations, but it manages to not lead to monopolies that can charge whatever they want because if the price goes too high, other players can jump through the hoops to enter the market. The regulation on healthcare has reached the point of a stranglehold.

Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
> why they aren't being captured and squeezed. They are. Maybe not by PE, but capitalism finds a way. This isn't the first time either the two big grocery chains in Canada have a long history of exploiting market dominance to screw over people who want to eat. https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/competition-bureau-probes-alleged-anticompetitive-conduct-by-loblaws-sobeys-owners-1.6899175 https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/competition-bureau-probes-al...
harimau777 2y ago
It's much easier to switch to different options with food than it is with healthcare. For example, if cartel forms around tropical fruits, people can switch to apples. This makes it much more difficult for someone to exert market power over the food market than over the medical market. Medical care also often involves crisis situations where you absolutely need care right now so you don't have much leverage. On the other hand, most of the time people have some flexibility in how much they eat, when they eat, and what they eat.
- SkyBelow 2y ago
  Healthcare prices aren't only high for emergency care, so it shows that the emergency nature of the work isn't the issue. I'm sure doing a statistical regression would show roughly what percentage of the issue is due to it, but I would expect it to be very low given the prices of things like medication needed on an ongoing basis where one could shop around, if it was legal to do so. One can also look at elective or non-emergency surgeries, especially those where people use medical tourism to find cheaper options. That is an extreme form of shopping around, which they have to do because more local forms of shopping around are legally banned.
- Arnt 2y ago
  If a cartel forms around tropical fruits… that strikes me as a strange and unreal example. Private equity buys supermarket chains in the real world. There are about six supermarket chaions in the city where I live. Most people will struggle to guess which ones are owned by private equity (one isn't), but almost everyone can name at least a couple of hospitals that aren't.
  - Turing_Machine 2y ago
    > If a cartel forms around tropical fruits… that strikes me as a strange and unreal example. It may seem unreal to you, but I can assure you that it actually happened at one point. It was a duopoly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Fruit_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Fruit_Company
    - Arnt 2y ago
      Good for podcasters who need weird and unusual events for their podcast stories. Less good if you want to understand the world.
      - Turing_Machine 2y ago
        What? The history of Central America is essentially the history of these companies. Looking into it will give you more "understanding of the world" than you probably think.
- pdonis 2y ago
  > It's much easier to switch to different options with food than it is with healthcare. It wouldn't be if the supply of health care were not artificially restricted by regulation. > Medical care also often involves crisis situations No, medical care sometimes involves crisis situations. But much more often it doesn't. A sane health care system would treat these two cases very differently. Care for crisis situations would be handled by insurance because that's what insurance is for: unexpected situations that you can't pay for out of pocket. But routine care would not. However, our system is not sane, and insists on bundling these two things together when that makes no sense.
CuriousCosmic 2y ago
That's really not the point. The point is that when you need food, you can go to any number of places to get it. So going to any one specific place is not a requirement. Compare that to healthcare. I get in an accident or call an ambulance. I don't get a choice where I go or who I see. I just go to wherever is nearest or has availability and hope that it's either not bad enough to justify me needing to go somewhere else or that I have the ability to be transferred to the location of my choice (at great cost). A more mild example are diseases like cancer. You'll have some more freedom on which place you go to but oncology is extremely diverse and specialised. Unless you get really lucky, odds are there's only a specific handful of doctors within a several hours drive of you that actually have a good idea of how to treat your specific cancer under the specific conditions you have it. So you go to whichever one of them can see you in a reasonable amount of time because otherwise you die. The same goes for many of the complex diseases people spend months or years diagnosing because they are so hard to pin down. And that's discussing situations where time is of the essence and you get very little choice in your options. And those tend to be the most expensive. There's plenty of other aspects of healthcare that are far cheaper of course and could be likened to the grocery store examples but drawing the regulatory line between the two is near impossible given the fuzzy nature of healthcare and medical science.

Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago

> why they aren't being captured and squeezed. They are. Maybe not by PE, but capitalism finds a way. This isn't the first time either the two big grocery chains in Canada have a long history of exploiting market dominance to screw over people who want to eat. https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/competition-bureau-probes-alleged-anticompetitive-conduct-by-loblaws-sobeys-owners-1.6899175 https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/competition-bureau-probes-al...

harimau777 2y ago

It's much easier to switch to different options with food than it is with healthcare. For example, if cartel forms around tropical fruits, people can switch to apples. This makes it much more difficult for someone to exert market power over the food market than over the medical market. Medical care also often involves crisis situations where you absolutely need care right now so you don't have much leverage. On the other hand, most of the time people have some flexibility in how much they eat, when they eat, and what they eat.

SkyBelow 2y ago
Healthcare prices aren't only high for emergency care, so it shows that the emergency nature of the work isn't the issue. I'm sure doing a statistical regression would show roughly what percentage of the issue is due to it, but I would expect it to be very low given the prices of things like medication needed on an ongoing basis where one could shop around, if it was legal to do so. One can also look at elective or non-emergency surgeries, especially those where people use medical tourism to find cheaper options. That is an extreme form of shopping around, which they have to do because more local forms of shopping around are legally banned.
Arnt 2y ago
If a cartel forms around tropical fruits… that strikes me as a strange and unreal example. Private equity buys supermarket chains in the real world. There are about six supermarket chaions in the city where I live. Most people will struggle to guess which ones are owned by private equity (one isn't), but almost everyone can name at least a couple of hospitals that aren't.
- Turing_Machine 2y ago
  > If a cartel forms around tropical fruits… that strikes me as a strange and unreal example. It may seem unreal to you, but I can assure you that it actually happened at one point. It was a duopoly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Fruit_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Fruit_Company
  - Arnt 2y ago
    Good for podcasters who need weird and unusual events for their podcast stories. Less good if you want to understand the world.
    - Turing_Machine 2y ago
      What? The history of Central America is essentially the history of these companies. Looking into it will give you more "understanding of the world" than you probably think.
pdonis 2y ago
> It's much easier to switch to different options with food than it is with healthcare. It wouldn't be if the supply of health care were not artificially restricted by regulation. > Medical care also often involves crisis situations No, medical care sometimes involves crisis situations. But much more often it doesn't. A sane health care system would treat these two cases very differently. Care for crisis situations would be handled by insurance because that's what insurance is for: unexpected situations that you can't pay for out of pocket. But routine care would not. However, our system is not sane, and insists on bundling these two things together when that makes no sense.

CuriousCosmic 2y ago

That's really not the point. The point is that when you need food, you can go to any number of places to get it. So going to any one specific place is not a requirement. Compare that to healthcare. I get in an accident or call an ambulance. I don't get a choice where I go or who I see. I just go to wherever is nearest or has availability and hope that it's either not bad enough to justify me needing to go somewhere else or that I have the ability to be transferred to the location of my choice (at great cost). A more mild example are diseases like cancer. You'll have some more freedom on which place you go to but oncology is extremely diverse and specialised. Unless you get really lucky, odds are there's only a specific handful of doctors within a several hours drive of you that actually have a good idea of how to treat your specific cancer under the specific conditions you have it. So you go to whichever one of them can see you in a reasonable amount of time because otherwise you die. The same goes for many of the complex diseases people spend months or years diagnosing because they are so hard to pin down. And that's discussing situations where time is of the essence and you get very little choice in your options. And those tend to be the most expensive. There's plenty of other aspects of healthcare that are far cheaper of course and could be likened to the grocery store examples but drawing the regulatory line between the two is near impossible given the fuzzy nature of healthcare and medical science.