It's an information asymmetry problem. If people knew which business were PE owned they would avoid them. This problem often happens when the cost of services is charged after delivery.
Any attempts to solve problems by the invisible hand of the Almighty Free Market will fail abysmally when the plurality of people in that market are severely resource-constrained.
Right now, all most people can afford to care about is what's cheapest. Any supposed wisdom about "revealed preferences" is essentially bullshit because of that.
If you want your much-vaunted Free Market Theory to bear any resemblance to reality, you will need to first ensure that
1) Everyone has a plentiful supply of disposable income, after all necessities and basic luxuries.
2) Participants in the market are mandated to fully disclose all pertinent attributes and conditions of their products and services—for instance, their ownership structure, how much lead, asbestos, and cadmium are in what they're selling, etc.
3) There are numerous participants in the market competing on roughly equal footing—that is to say, the market is not a monopoly or duopoly, or anything even vaguely close to that (dozens to hundreds of competitors, not just a handful—with, of course, the numbers dependent on the nature of the particular market).
4) The market in question has elasticity of demand—any attempts to "let the market decide" with things like housing and healthcare will always fail, at least to some extent, because people who lack them for an extended period of time will die, and thus effectively act under coercion.
And note that these things are the absolute bare minimum required for a "free market" to operate anything like Free Market Theory says it should—other conditions can make it operate more smoothly and effectively. And it's entirely possible I'm forgetting some.
1) The best way to ensure this is to make the necessities of life (I'm not sure what you mean by "basic luxuries", but let's lump those both together for now) as cheap as possible. The main reason in our actual world that this does not happen has nothing to do with "free markets" and everything to do with governments putting their thumb on the scales and playing favorites.
2) The only reason you think this is necessary is that for many things, there are too few providers for competition to force all the providers to either provide this information or have no customers. And what's the reason for that? Governments putting their thumb on the scales and playing favorites.
3) Same response as 2).
4) You seem to be ignorant of the fact that, at least in the US, housing and healthcare were once provided in a free market--and given the technology of the time, the average quality was better than it is in the US today. The reason things are messed up today, again, has nothing to do with "free markets" and everything to do with government meddling.
In other words, all the things you're complaining about are not failures of the "free market"; they're failures of government.
The reason PE buys them out is because they can make more money by jacking up the prices. If they had to publish their prices consumers would choose a cheaper option, ie not PE.
tons of businesses currently advertise their "family owned & operated" status in America. so in the future, seeing marketing around "not owned by PE" wouldn't be a surprise
That theory is correct for people whom you get the choice to interact with once or twice with in your life, like realtors and funeral home directors or picking your thesis advisor, but really falls apart for anyone who has a regular customer base of people who come back for repeat service.
If my dentist starts charging me double and starts treating me like shit, I really couldn't care less about the practice's ownership structure, or how clean and well-structured, and unit-tested the code that runs on his computer is, If I have a choice, I'll look somewhere else. If I don't have a choice, I'll bitch, but keep going to him.
At no point will I care whether or not the office is PE-owned. It's utterly irrelevant to me.
A lot of Americans pay for dental services through insurance which adds another layer of complexity. The insurance provider negotiates and then just passes through the cost, of course this leads to higher prices than market competition provides. Dental services need to publish price lists, this will allow for price discovery and market competition.
For any non-trivial work, dentists will happily look around in your mouth, and then give you an itemized quote for how much treatment will cost, before they schedule treatment for you. They aren't doctors, they know how much two pills of ibuprofen cost.
You absolutely can comparison shop (Even if the dentist in question doesn't exactly know what % of the bill your insurer will reimburse, and the best they can do for that is to give a rough estimate.)
It's probably not worth it for routine work if you're insured, and absolutely worth it for anything serious, or if you don't have insurance.
One of the best things trump did was forcing hospitals to publish their price lists. Dentists should be regulated and publish their prices too. Allow for comparison shopping.
No, it works for the vet too. I have suspected for a long time that they are fucking us on prices but it's difficult to compare them. I always pay after services rendered.
