> The bulk of the rents is captured instead by providers of health-care services such as hospitals and the system’s true money-makers: insurers, pharmacy-benefi

> The bulk of the rents is captured instead by providers of health-care services such as hospitals and the system’s true money-makers: insurers, pharmacy-benefit managers and other middlemen taking advantage of its opacity. This category of "providers of health-care services" is rather over-broad, and I wish they had split it up more. Shouldn't hospitals (which actually _provide health care_ and are necessary parts of the healthcare system) be in a separate bucket from the "middlemen"? And within the hospital category, don't we need to draw some distinctions? Currently in the US there's been press about how recent funding changes are causing a bunch of rural hospitals to shut down. It seems that some hospitals are major money losers, though we as a society may want them to continue to exist (or else a rural person in a medical emergency has no chance of getting care in time). But what's happening at the hospitals that _are_ collecting "rents", esp since in more urban contexts there are often multiple hospitals and one might expect more competition?