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Comment by nickff | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that the group collecting the lion's share of the economic rents from healthcare is not insurance or pharmaceutical company executives, but doctors and nurses. Pretending that executives are responsible for ever-increasing healthcare costs is very popular, but (almost) completely untrue.

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That's a strange claim to make even if it is factually correct (of course the majority of costs in the industry go to the thousands of front-line workers, and not the few executives) and not even really what I'm saying. It's the profit motive of the entire "healthcare industry" that I have a problem with, which is at odds with what people actually need ("healthcare"). If it were not so possible to extract wealth from the fact that people need health care, food, housing, etc., we could focus efforts on providing the best possible outcomes and not simply the most profitable ones.

There's a reason doctors drive nice cars and wear nice shoes; they are collecting monopoly rents. The doctors and nurses are the ones extracting the vast majority of the wealth from the ever-growing healthcare sector. The problem is that saying we want more, lower-quality doctors, and cheaper foreign ones to improve services and reduce our expenditures is politically unpopular.

Doesn't medical school in the US cost something like $350,000? That might have something to do with high doctor salary. Doctors and nurses, heck let's include hospital janitors too, are not "extracting wealth" from the healthcare sector. They are being compensated for their labor and skills. Wealth extraction occurs when people profit from the industry who are not performing any labor or providing any value.

Medical schools are the method by which doctors control the supply of competitors (as the AMA controls school accreditation).[1] The schools are simply collecting their share of the rent.

[1] https://medianism.org/2018/03/31/occupational-licensing-is-t...

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