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The market would have fixed this, or at least made it suck a lot less, if it weren't for a very strong regulatory capture, certificates of need for hospitals, regulatory bottlenecks to creating doctors, etc, etc.

Notice how the dental industry doesn't have nearly the same problems even if you control for the scope of the work they do.

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Americans have a higher than normal instance of late life dental issues because nobody ever actually pays to go to the dentist before they're thirty. Most employee healthcare doesn't significantly cover dental and paying out of pocket is unreasonable - this is much the same for the vision market.

The problem is we don’t let the market fix it. Instead we continue to pile on regulations that decentivize competition for better health outcomes. Blame the socialist democrats and conservatives that continue to strengthen the monopolies on healthcare because there’s no question about it, too much regulation is the culprit

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