Comment by jakub_g | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jakub_g | Hacker News Reader

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> I heard a few years back that a US health insurance startup had to provide on the order of 6000 pages of documentation to be approved. No wonder that there hadn't been another provider for twenty years or so. It seems like some things are hard to build mostly because some people want it that way.

Very often regulation starts lean, then inevitably some assholes take advantage of it to their profit, so the regulation becomes more and more specific and complex. Rinse and repeat.

It starts at individual level. In France, health insurance providers started reimbursing eyewear, with a rule "one pair of glasses each 2 years". Now everyone buys new glasses every 2 years, sharp, because "I'm paying for it", even if they don't really need new glasses. Stuff like this make insurance price go up for everyone as a result, which incentivizes you even more to be an abuser. The rules are now more strict about the how much is reimbursed, because people obviously go for most expensive Gucci frames allowed.

Insurance is not meant to cover routine purchases, it's meant to cover purchases that are unexpected and too large to cover.

We have a publicly paid health system in Norway, but we still have: * Copays until you reach €200 * No dental coverage for routine operations (only major surgeries) * No eyewear coverage (I assume if you have some eye illness requiring surgery or similar it will be covered)

Seems to work fine, and that France should change what insurance does cover

I think the single biggest roadblock to building new things is regulation. How do we eliminate most regulations, and simplify the rest to fight off regulatory capture?

What if we had a github for laws and required that anybody who worked on a law use their real name and if they were paid by a company they had to list how much?

"Use GitHub for lawmaking" is something I've had in mind for a long time. However, not sure how this could work in practice.

I've heard from a friend of mine who used to work for Deloitte (or similar kind of company) that on practical level, lawmaking often happens in those private consulting/lawyer's offices - it's not like a MPs sits down and write stuff down themselves. So the git commit would say "John Smith the lawyer" which tells you nothing.

There's probably also so many patches and reverts and rewrites going on that history would be really bloated. Or if you want nice history, you lose all those important nuances you wanted in first place ("who exactly put this comma here which changes the whole meaning?").

It would also probably horrendously slow down the law making process. (which might actually be a good thing in many scenarios!)

Regulation is all about stopping people from getting taken advantage of, or hurt, usually by their own decisions.

Financial regulation is mostly about stopping people from selling dodgy investment schemes that are some variant of Ponzi.

Health and Safety regulation is mostly about stopping people from doing stupid things that might kill them.

FDA is about stopping Snake Oil salesmen. And y'know, making sure the drugs we're sold don't make us worse.

You can see it coming in the Cryptocurrency world - people lose money on stupid bets and then feel that someone else should have done something to stop this. Someone being the regulatory agencies.

So what would a solid set of regulations for crypto look like? What process would you devise that would result in a set of rules that prevented most of the crooks from profiting from their crookedness, while allowing honest folks to make some money investing in crypto?

so when (extra) cost goes to zero, the demand goes to infinity?

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