[DanielBMarkham]

Wish I could double-upvote you, Paul. Health care has been regulatory-captured for a long time now. (Obligatory blog link to relevant anecdote: http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/06/if-we-told-yo... )

I don't know if anybody has read Thomas Kuhn, but this has a parallel in how science works. Science gets "stuck" in one way of thinking. During this time, people work on small details and innovate in tiny ways around the edges. After enough pressure builds up for a change, there's a paradigm shift (he was the guy who coined the phrase) and people start working in the new world.

Complex, rule-based systems of people are mostly quantum by nature. Progress is never a straight line. Instead, it stays frustratingly far away, then it jumps. The stuff you read about in school where everything happened in a linear, step-by-step fashion was just a bowdlerized version of things they tell kids.

Hopefully the system does not require an extreme amount of pressure and our next jump is not too far away. (Apologies to students of Kuhn if I butchered his thesis badly. This is what I got from his work)

[asr]

Not to derail, but the regulatory capture in this article is mostly an absence of enforcement of laws. Retractable Technologies had to file their own antitrust suit because the DOJ and FTC wouldn't investigate GPOs.

The next time someone suggests antitrust laws are uniformly bad and should be abolished due to their (mis)application in tech, this is a great counterpoint.