People like to pretend like all government regulation is stifling to innovation, but it is pretty clear that some regulation is necessary for a properly functioning market.
The trick is, how much is too much. There needs to be a very good reason to shield any company from anti-trust regulations and I can't think of a valid one that would apply to medical supply companies.
It's not just a matter of "how much" regulation, but which regulations.
A field can be both over-regulated and under-regulated at the same time, in different ways. It might have the right total number of regulations, but too many that stifle innovation and too few that actually protect consumers. (Unfortunately, due to the nature of politics, those trying to remove the stifling regulations and those trying to add consumer protections often end up at each others throats.)
Market design is wicked hard. That's the role of governments. Business (court) law, a fair and impartial judiciary, enforcement, currency, etc.
I don't mind so much that any particular system is broken.
What troubles me is how hard it is to fix.
We're all staring at the elephant in the room. But the incumbent vested parties making a buck from a broken system, to the detriment of everyone else, are super effective at blocking reform.
I think that saying that regulation is necessary (as opposed to desirable) might be too strong. In most cases things can still function without regulation, because people know things aren't regulated and can take that into account by being cautious. Now, this is often inefficient and causes some number of people to get screwed over, but it still works.
I'm sure there could exist some golden system of regulation for health care and there are even countries like Singapore seem to have found something close enough, but its not clear to me that our current system in the US actually manages to be better than no regulation at all.
I disagree. Regulations are absolutely necessary for a functional market.
Corporate espionage, sabotage, outright lying about your products, financial fraud, tying, price fixing, collusion, bid rigging, geosplitting, ponzi schemes and dozens of other manifestations of bad corporate practices that regulations prevent (or try to) were put in place in the first place because they destroy markets. These aren't hypothetical problems either, there are many many instances of these practices happening over the last few centuries.
Hell, this article effectively says that medical providers are engaged in product tying and it is destroying the market!
Truly free markets are a myth. The best you get is mostly fair markets.
"Saying that regulation is necessary might be too strong"?
Some regulation is always necessary. How would you expect contracts to work without contract law (i.e. regulations governing how contracts are to be interpreted, enforced, disputes about them are to be resolved, etc.)?
It is very clear to me that our current system manages to be better than no regulation at all (even though it is arguably worse than the ideal quantity and quality of regulation). To my knowledge, the only places with no regulation are places like Somalia, where the guy who has the largest number of the fiercest relatives and friends with guns gets to decide what the people around them should do.
The trick is, how much is too much. There needs to be a very good reason to shield any company from anti-trust regulations and I can't think of a valid one that would apply to medical supply companies.