Healthcare is cheaper in every country everywhere regardless of whether they have public or private coverage. This implies that the difference isn't public vs. private, it's some other regulatory differences which are driving up costs in the US.
"Regulatory capture" is the regulations the people complaining about regulations are complaining about.
"Lack of government oversight" almost never leads to high consumer prices. It can lead to externalities, but if there are no regulations preventing anyone else from competing with the incumbents, it's very hard to sustain monopoly rents.
> Most people in the U.S. think regulations are bad in and of themselves. Regulations as a concept are the wrong target.
Regulations as a concept are the category of thing which is causing the problem. You then have to look into which specific regulations are contributing to the problem, but there are 10,000 of them. You can name some of them, like Certificate of Need laws, but that's just a representative example rather than an exhaustive list of every problematic regulation. So people say "regulations" or "inefficient regulations" because what else are they supposed to call them?
Hardly anybody thinks the ban on leaded gasoline is a bad regulation.
> Lack of government oversight and regulations almost always leads, eventually, to cartel pricing and/or monopolistic type pricing.
Only if you're specifically talking about lack of antitrust regulations, which is the exception rather than the rule in the overall category of regulations.
Most regulations simply increase costs. This is true whether they're good or bad. The ban on leaded gasoline increases the price of gasoline; lead is a cheaper stabilizer than what they use now. The ban on circumventing DRM increases the price of playback devices (or reduces quality at the same price); device makers have to pay to license the stupid DRM and it impairs competition by preventing anyone from making a device with features Hollywood doesn't like. But the ban on leaded gasoline is a good regulation because it's preventing a major externality, whereas the ban on circumventing DRM is a bad regulation because it doesn't do what it was sold as doing and instead is used by the studios to capture the market for playback devices.
Getting rid of bad regulations improves efficiency and lowers prices.
We tried the no regulation method after the Civil War. It lead to robber barons and an overall shitty country. Regulations as in the concept is not the problem. Bad oversight and governance is.
I honestly don't understand why someone can't say "we should get rid of these bad regulations which are causing problems" without someone hearing "we should get rid of all laws of any kind whatsoever".
Because for 40 years now the Republican party has demonized regulations as a concept. So now we are in a situation where people like you write:
Regulations as a concept are the category of thing which is causing the problem.
No sensible person thinks regulations as a concept is bad but, well, roughly 1/3 of the U.S. population is not sensible on this topic. No sensible person thinks all regulations are good. Regulation is not the thing to talk about since the issue isn't regulation but bad governance and oversight. The issue is politicians in the pockets of insurance companies. The issue is that we live in a country where profit is the holy of holies that must not be messed with.
The actual problem is that "regulations are bad" has become a decent heuristic, because such a high proportion of the existing and proposed regulations are a result of regulatory capture. Your objection seems to be that you want to call this "bad governance" instead of "bad regulations" but it's not clear how that's even supposed to be different.
The number of people who think that all regulations are bad is limited to a handful of actual anarchists with no real power and a presumably larger number of rules pedants who want to play different definitional games where they use "regulations" to refer to the things they don't like and call the things that they do like "laws" or "rights" or some other allegedly distinct thing where the distinguishing criteria is doing all the work.
Of course, getting people to spend all day arguing about terms is to the advantage of the people who like the status quo, because then they can get the people who claim regulation is generally good to pass their regulatory capture rules and get the people who claim regulation is generally bad to repeal or fail to enforce the e.g. antitrust rules intended to protect people from their predatory behavior. But then you're just playing into their game -- the Certificate of Need laws etc. are of the first category.
