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Comment by Buttons840 | Hacker News Reader

The free market solution to this seems to be making it easy / easier for competitors to arise. Then, when private equity does this, the customers, and workers, just hop ship to a competitor that's better managed and the original clinic goes under.

I don't expect this happens in reality though. In general the things that happen in a healthy free market are NOT happening in our society.

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This completely discounts the work involved to find service providers you trust. I spent a long time finding a Doctor I trust, finding a Vet I trust, etc. I don't want a "free market" solution where I need to switch providers every 6 months because some rich dude is being a dick.

This is the problem with so many market focused solutions. They discount the burden put on the consumer.

If the market is healthy, there will already be two or three providers in town instead of one that has any sort of monopoly, and the LBO won't be lucrative to begin with.

Unless the PE firm comes in and buys up all of the vet practices in town (or enough of them), which is a tactic they like to employ.

They buy all of them.

In a perfect world we'd have antitrust enforcement all the way from the top of government down to the municipality, so that this kind of behavior could be curbed. But I bet few cities bother to try at all.

You're complaining about healthcare being tied to employment. That sucks. Yeah, we should get rid of that.

Coupling healthcare and employment makes it harder for agents to move and trade "freely" in the "free market".

So, I say again. The things that happen in a healthy free market are not happening in our society.

The original poster was talking about vets, which don’t have that issue.

I think the idea is that you'd have to switch less often.

People can scam you and jerk you around because you don't have options.

If you had options, they might be less inclined

Participating in a market is work, the only way a market (or life in general) works is if you hold your counterparties accountable.

> I don't want a "free market" solution where I need to switch providers every 6 months because some rich dude is being a dick.

Nature does not have a mandate that good quality services and products be available at low prices at all times. The rich dude being a “dick” was a tired vet owner who wanted to sell their equity, just like anyone else who sells their SP500 shares or their house.

The only thing that can be done is encourage government policies to ensure more sellers exist.

Nature doesn't have a mandate for anything. It's up to us to shape the world we want to have as a society

You’re confused because you are treating free-market and capitalism as the same thing.

Capitalism is about who owns the assets, free markets are about how they are transferred. They don’t require each other. State owned enterprises can participate in the free market, an example are municipal utility companies. Private enterprises can operate without a free market, an example would be Lockheed Martin, whose defense business is mostly cost plus contracts.

The US hobbled the free market with deregulation since the 1980s. We encourage monopolies with strange reactionary legal precedent, use tax and other policy to establish price floors on residential units and health procedures.

The behavior that these firms are able to carry on with in veterinary, dental, dermatology, hvac and plumbing is anti-competitive and predatory.

A business owner lamented to me recently that it wasn't the taxes that were crushing his business, but the costly regulations that keep on coming.

The harder the government makes it to operate a business, the less businesses there will be.

One alternative is to educate the population so that regulations are less necessary. But having an educated population has become unpopular.

Fewer businesses. But that aside when people say regulations are costly without providing specifics typically they are upset they can't rip off the public, pollute the environment or perform other acts to the disadvantage of the population.

Very nuanced take, thank you for your insight.

Free markets are a fiction, the real world contains a lot of friction.

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