True but “there’s no one boogeyman to blame” should read as “there are many, many boogeymen, all of whom bear blame, and all of whom need to corrected/removed/circumvented/improved.”
In theory I can bypass my employer insurance - but if I do I throw away thousands of dollars that my employer is paying directly and so anything I find elsewhere either cannot be as good, or is has to cost a lot more money.
The system sucks a lot, and for a lot of different reasons. Namely is that there's no room for individual negotiation, and there are dozens of pricing models for the same drugs, procedures, etc.
I fucking hate it here.
All of these are reasonable attempts to solve big, important problems and I don't think it's helpful to throw your hands in the air and say no one is trying to do anything.
We need ACTUAL SOLUTIONS. Changes to existing laws, or new laws. Consensus governance, not just executive orders.
They both suck, one side notably more so.
In general the current FTC is better than most in my lifetime, that said, there are plenty of other areas of Govt that are really bad, and even the FTC and SEC could be doing much, much more. It's a mixed bag.
Contrary to a lot of replies, I don't think that another Trump presidency would be particularly worse in these areas as they are pretty populist in nature. Trump isn't a die hard conservative, he's really a populist first.
When it comes to improving systems like these, incompetence, hamfistedness, and inaction can be plenty damaging by themselves. "I will roll back ACA and replace it with [crickets for 4+ years]" is a worse alternative.
And even then, some issues are far more important and foundational than others.