Hacker News Reader

Comment by marketingPro | Hacker News Reader

No conversation about United States healthcare should continue without acknowledgement of Regulatory Capture through legal bribery.

https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/top-spenders?cy...

The healthcare industry protects it's employees and owners at the expense of the customer.

There's nothing capitalistic here, there's nothing scientific about having monopoly control over healthcare services (Physicians, pharmacists).

As a note, I am shooting myself in the foot discussing this, my wife makes 200k/yr as a doctor of Physical Therapy running her own clinic. And her cartel isn't even on that list.

View on HN

>There's nothing capitalistic here

Really? The process of using capital to erode regulatory inhibitions and thus facilitate the accumulation of even more capital and so on in a feedback loop seems to me to be exhibiting the very essence of capitalism.

Albeit not in a good way.

One of the core anti-capitalist aspects of hospitals are the guaranteed monopolies that many states grant hospitals, in the form of certificates of need. Searching for that term in the article resulted in 0 hits. Not sure how you can discuss this phenomenon without at least mentioning the guaranteed monopoly aspect.

CONs are what are really backing the loans that would otherwise be very unlikely to be available and are what made hospital acquisitions of the type discussed "profitable".

I was involved as representing a large vendor and investor in the hospital that was stiffed by a smaller version of one of these hospital pillagings and got a terrifying inside look at how these deals go down.

I've read there are positive effects of CONs and realize my experience was very limited.

> I've read there are positive effects of CONs

You can read about the positive effects of ingesting mercury if you want to.

Capitalism would have the free market (and therefore its consumers) deciding which regulations are needed, how much to pay and if a single company has a natural monopoly or not.

What we get is corrupted politicians stealing money from everyone and imposing regulations under the threat of violence and incarceration.

I understand where you're coming from, anti-capitalist often conflate capitalism with government control - but they're completely different things.

Perhaps the ideal form of capitalism would involve free markets and competition. Adam Smith sure expected that.

The problem is that people with capital inevitably find it more efficient to leverage their capital to eliminate competition, capture markets, and extract value for value's sake.

It takes a lot of government regulation to ensure free markets.

We'll, if we're using that type of definition of capitalism then we really don't want to compare it to that type of definition of any other competing system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com