A common thing many tend to misunderstand, is that there's a difference between a free market, and a competitive market.

The most competitive/efficient markets generally need the optimal amount of regulation to keep/get them that way. Those regulations would ensure that these conditions continue to be met in order for it to be a competitive market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition#Idealizing...

Free markets that are completely unregulated will tend to veer towards collusion and monopolies, in which case they're no longer competitive and the customers suffer. Free markets that are overly regulated will also suffer, but more-so due to things like the regulatory burden/barriers for new entrants.

What we have in the US healthcare system is a demented hybrid where some parts are free market but under-regulated, while other parts are free market but over-regulated. It's the worst of free market and state-run combined.

It's not the same regulation.

Yeah. A lot of flamewars have happened: "regulation bad!" vs "no, regulation good!".

But in reality, good regulation is good, and bad regulation is bad.

It sounds silly written out because it's a tautology, but if more people internalized it we could have much more productive conversations. Instead of going back and forth on whether regulation is good or bad, we should try to figure out which regulations are good and which are bad, and then try to get rid of the bad ones and pass more of the good ones.

I’d argue that the underlying system that makes the regulation in US is broken. So you aren’t going to end up with many good regulations without changing the system. Which looks nigh impossible until some black swan event.

>But in reality, good regulation is good, and bad regulation is bad.

No one brick in the road to hell is bad. But you can definitely pave a road to hell with the accumulation of "positive" changes. People tend to define positive over too short a timeline or too narrowly.

No one square meter of nature is bad. But you can definitely doom people to horribly die because there is a natural swamp between them and the hospital. People tend to define 'natural' too narrowly, forgetting that 'things that are natural' includes cocaine, tapeworms, rape, birth defects, the Plague and cancer

Are you implying that individual regulations all have some inherent goodness on their own?

They're just rules we make for ourselves. There's nothing special about them. Opinions like that are why we can't fix messes like this.

It sounds silly because it is silly. Interested parties prioritize various policies with varying degrees of priority.

Effective regulation is somewhat of an organisational skill.

Perhaps its just low pay attracting low talent

No. It's the high profit attracting high incentive to capture the regulation.

The goal of the regulation is to increase prices (profit) while preventing other parties from competing on prices

I am always amazed by these "no-regulation" arguers - how are you doing to resolve disputes?

Suppose I want to sell my product, and find a company willing to buy, a middle manager signs the contract. When the company recieved my product, it refuses to pay, says this person was not authorised to sign the contract on behalf of the company.

Must the company prove the purchase was unauthorised, or must I prove the employee was authorised? Suppose employee was unauthorised, is it my or the company's problem if this guy 'took initiative', who eats the loss?

What if they already used my product and only realised after the bill came due? What if the deal was overpriced like 10x from market average? What if the guy's title says 'Head of procurement' but the company swears their bylaws don't allow him to authorise purchases?

They weren't talking about the concept of regulation. Just the reality of the US's ones.

And I think you're talking about contract law, not regulations.

There can be bad actors in free markets or socialist institutions. The issue isn't the system itself, but instead the people overseeing it.

It seems more regulated healthcare systems are also significantly less capable of developing innovative treatments (although this could be a misunderstanding of mine)

I think it is a misunderstanding. The two places in the world where everyone agrees it is easiest to get medtech devices developed are Australia and Mexico.

(Source: was doing medtech development for a while in the early 2010s).

You are wrong on this point. Some years ago, I’ve undergo some pretty innovative surgery procedure (I was one of the first hundreds people in the entire world).

I don’t know how it works in the US but at least in France, most hospitals are part of universities so they are also doing a lot of research.