[JumpCrisscross]

> pretty sure they're advocating better taxing the PE firms looting billions, not the vets making $150k/year

My point is this isn’t a symptom of closing the carried-interest loophole. It’s fundamental to the business. The fixed costs of administering a veterinary clinic demand scale, and scale thirsts for capital.

[matthewdgreen]

If this was about administering practices more efficiently at scale, we’d see acquired practices lowering their prices and competing more aggressively due to their better cost structure. If this was about rent seeking by buying up a limited supply of regulated businesses, we’d see prices surge upward. In most of the purchased practices we’re seeing the latter.

[JumpCrisscross]

> we’d see acquired practices lowering their prices and competing more aggressively due to their better cost structure

Introducing a new fixed cost into a market should not be expected to increase competitiveness. It almost always reduces it. The trade-off with regulation is that trade-off is worth it.

Put another way: if you are a $50mm practice, and it suddenly becomes infeasible to run anything smaller than $40mm, your market power increases. You have less competition.