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Maybe I'm just a pessimist, but most of the industry-facing benefits of price opacity seem to entail a parallel set of benefits for regulators, legislators and nonprofits. If the meme that Healthcare is Priceless signs blank checks for producers in the industry, it presumably works the same way for bureaucrats and lawmakers, who get a free pass to accumulate power, expand surveillance, reward cronies and promote pet causes through selective disbursement of all that funding. And that's leaving out the large proportion of regulators/ lawmakers who are just literally in bed with parts of the industry, like the FDA folks who retire to take plum positions with Pharma.
I'm sure you could get that class to happily support selected instances of price-limiting legislation where it might hurt their political adversaries, but who's the constituency for plain consumer empowerment, beyond just Joe Q. Public?
Possibly so. I don't know what mess we're gonna get, but in the linked comment, I read the tea leaves that might be pointing toward at least something happening, even if it's a mess and not terribly coherent:
Public outrage can quickly boil to the point that "something must be done". Once it gets there, Sagan only knows what mess of a "something" we're going to get. Maybe the medical industry can consider banking on their regulatory capture enough that they can shape the output to at least not hurt them too much, or even to benefit them. But again, looking at how it's gone in other industries, I don't know that I'd count on it. I doubt it would be pure pro-consumer, but there's a good chance we'll get some mess of "something", which they might not super like. I bet the IoT industry wishes now that they had figured out a way to eliminate default passwords from the industry before, for example.
I sure hope you're right. But does there exist a historical precedent for any industry ever moving from "heavily bureaucratized, intensively regulated, ideologically freighted, opaque, inefficient and expensive" toward "lean, simple, transparent and consumer-oriented" in any meaningful way under a modern state? If so, I'd genuinely love to hear about it.
Hold your horses. I'm hoping for incremental change. I ain't nearly that hopeful, either. More likely, we'll get some bomb of other confused regulation, which might have some incidental pro-consumer stuff.
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