The Hollow Men of Hims

The explosive growth of Hims and other side-channel healthcare businesses (using this model -- telehealth combined with compounded meds) is entirely due to the "legitimate" healthcare system's complete and total failure to serve patients' needs.

You can maybe talk about the hollow men of Novo and Lilly, who colluded with PBMs and insurers for most of a decade to push the cost of insulin analogues into the stratosphere, taking billions in profit while people died in agony rationing insulin. (in horrible agony -- blood turning into acid until brain death)

An oligopoly colluding to push the price of easily produced products into the stratosphere isn't a product of deregulation. In a deregulated or under-regulated market, thousands of cottage-industry insulin producers would be competing to shave pennies off the prices of their insulin. You might have a hard time finding safely produced insulin, but you wouldn't have a hard time finding cheap insulin.

Oligopolies colluding to elevate prices of necessities to fatal levels is a product of regulation. In cases like these, incumbent businesses support regulation because it raises barriers to entry for new entrants; this results in oligopoly or monopoly, permitting the extraction of monopoly rents, even when people are literally dying in the streets because they can't afford products like insulin which are extremely cheap to produce.

(Insulin wasn't always cheap to produce, but for 43 years now it's produced by genetically engineered microorganisms, which makes it very cheap. It's a tiny protein, only 51 amino acids, produced from a 110-amino-acid precursor protein.)

This is a complex picture, so there's much more going on here than Big Pharma trying to squeeze out white-knight compounding pharmacies and supplement makers. What we have in the US is an industry that is constantly at the brink of system collapse, because that's the point of maximum efficiency/optimization. Pharma charges whatever payers (insurance companies) will support, and payers pass on whatever consumers can bear before literally becoming insolvent.

Consumers are so alienated that they'll pay out of pocket for a disruptor like Hims, which is doing its best to circumvent the entire system. Sadly, just as there's little government oversight to prevent pharma from becoming monopolistic, there's virtually no regulation on supplements. So you end up with the worst of both worlds; you can either take the $1000 monopoly pill or the $2 gas station pill filled with sawdust and raccoon repellant.