Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

You're referring to extreme government regulation making it prohibitively expensive to start up insulin providers that compete with the established government protected monopolies. Which is anything but Capitalism in action.

The same goes for healthcare in general. It's one of the most regulated sectors of the US economy and the government places an extreme cost on doing most anything in that sector through hyper regulation and very epic scale barriers to entry. The US is very far from being a Capitalist healthcare system, it's in fact the worst of both systems: it's a hyper regulated corporatist system, intentionally protected by the government from competition, captured by corporations.



Many states even have Certificate of Need (known as CON in the industry) laws where incumbent medical providers, including whole hospitals, can effectively veto new entrants. Add in limited licensing for doctors (the number of medical spots in schools as not kept up with population) among other things and you've got a problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_need


This is part of the reason why I distinguish between free-market economics and capitalism, where the people with capital make the rules (including social capital, like current doctors).

At the level of persuasion, I don't understand why people use and defend "capitalism" rather than "free-market economics".




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: