>But why doesn't this happen to restaurants, or super markets or car mechanics?
This is a bafflingly underinformed rhetorical given the previous sentence. It happens all the time with the exact counter-examples you list. I'm honestly shocked you mentioned restaurants when articles were floating around HN less than a week ago about the death of Red Lobster by way of private equity:
> Why don't new cardiologists enter the field? Because there is a cap of graduates that the AMA controls.
The AMA doesn't have the authority to cap anything, and I encourage you to devote more research to your premises before relying so heavily on them. The cap on new doctors arises from a complex set of competing laws, policies, and blended public/private billing models for how doctors get trained and paid during residencies, which itself is downstream of how hospitals are funded and operated. There is no singular "do this -> get more doctors" solution; it is enormously complicated, often by both design and necessity, and is not easily untangled with the naive techie "just make a pull request" mentality that pervades the HN comments section. You also seem to misunderstand what the AMA does and have miscast it as some sort of central licensing authority when most of what they due is effete lobbying and begging physicians for donations/dues. They're annoying and probably a net negative for public health at this point, but they're not some boogeyman holding back the libertarian fantasy of an unregulated healthcare market.
>Try to ask your doctor how much something costs and they'll stare at you like you have two heads. Imagine getting your car fixed without knowing how much it's going to cost
I can't help but notice that you didn't mention the role of private health insurance when that undergirds much of the grousing. Doctors can't give you an answer on what your procedure will cost because they have to play a multi-stage game of Price is Right with a cartel of investor-driven private health insurers with the express business model of avoiding paying for those services whenever possible. The fact that everyone BUT the investors suffer from this arrangement is the actual, literal point of the article - it's even in the byline!
This is a bafflingly underinformed rhetorical given the previous sentence. It happens all the time with the exact counter-examples you list. I'm honestly shocked you mentioned restaurants when articles were floating around HN less than a week ago about the death of Red Lobster by way of private equity:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40233029
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/private-equity-keeps-failing-...
https://www.pepboys.com/about-pep-boys/media-center/press-re...
https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/private-equity-superst...
> Why don't new cardiologists enter the field? Because there is a cap of graduates that the AMA controls.
The AMA doesn't have the authority to cap anything, and I encourage you to devote more research to your premises before relying so heavily on them. The cap on new doctors arises from a complex set of competing laws, policies, and blended public/private billing models for how doctors get trained and paid during residencies, which itself is downstream of how hospitals are funded and operated. There is no singular "do this -> get more doctors" solution; it is enormously complicated, often by both design and necessity, and is not easily untangled with the naive techie "just make a pull request" mentality that pervades the HN comments section. You also seem to misunderstand what the AMA does and have miscast it as some sort of central licensing authority when most of what they due is effete lobbying and begging physicians for donations/dues. They're annoying and probably a net negative for public health at this point, but they're not some boogeyman holding back the libertarian fantasy of an unregulated healthcare market.
>Try to ask your doctor how much something costs and they'll stare at you like you have two heads. Imagine getting your car fixed without knowing how much it's going to cost
I can't help but notice that you didn't mention the role of private health insurance when that undergirds much of the grousing. Doctors can't give you an answer on what your procedure will cost because they have to play a multi-stage game of Price is Right with a cartel of investor-driven private health insurers with the express business model of avoiding paying for those services whenever possible. The fact that everyone BUT the investors suffer from this arrangement is the actual, literal point of the article - it's even in the byline!