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Why don't you elaborate instead of just yelling "free market!" and waving your hands? How might we encourage competition effectively?


No one can open a new, competing hospital without the permission of the lousy overpriced hospitals that its intended to compete with.

Yes, you need your competitor's permission to enter the market. Its the law.

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


Eliminate drug patents, remove the annual cap on medical students in doctoral programs, remove that requirement entirely from a medical license and let anyone practice medicine that wants to (albeit with some regulation requiring a practitioner explicitly state their qualifications, and you would have to prosecute impostors).

That would probably lead to what we have today - people only trust literal doctorates from top medical schools - but you could open new medical schools to placate demand, and hopefully reduce the workload required to obtain a medical license (the current 8+ years of schooling is excessive for any profession) or provide some kind of doctoral certification program outside the bounds of academia, though I have no intimate knowledge to know how you would do it.

It does become buyer beware, but it also means you would have treatment at most pay grades. Also, if it wasn't illegal to produce chemical compounds (really, that is dumb, and all the arguments of how they produce progress because of profit motive is pointless if nobody can afford the result, and the investment funds in big pharma would find other avenues to stimulate growth and research). The costs of care would fall absurdly fast if there weren't a dozen golden gates on the road to being a medical professional or medical facility, I wouldn't even mind if they just reduced the barriers, but they are too high and too plentiful right now.




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