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Meaningful reforms are the more important part of that sentence. If reforms are rejected until you get to the point of populist demands, those will likely be hijacked by special interests, as you note in the case of housing.
The princial-agent conflict I was thinking about was "my insurance is paid for by my employer, who has no incentive to limit total costs to me or to provide good coverage," but adding market consolidation adds additional problems: health insurance companies withholding payment from independent doctors to give the providers incentive to
sell outjoin their affiliated provider network. Ditto health insurance companies owning healthcare providers, PBMs, and pharmacies. It gets even more pernicious. In the case of my family, UHC was hiring staff out of clinics as consultants, who then acted as medical professionals to assert that continuing care wasn't necessary. There were at least two backchannels between these consultants and people working as care providers in the clinic, and there was some exaggeration of the recovery going on in the official medical charts, which the consultants then used to argue against further care. What's a little favoratism between friends?I agree that contract reform is nice, but it is only putting a band-aid over the fact that we went from a vibrant market with ~200 major defense contractors to five. As we see in space, merely doubling the number of options the buyer has can vastly change the incentives driving market participants.
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