←back to thread

The Hollow Men of Hims

(www.alexkesin.com)
204 points quadrin | 1 comments | 25 Jun 25 22:59 UTC | HN request time: 0.221s | source
Show context
mlsu ◴[26 Jun 25 00:18 UTC] No.44383056[source]▶
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)

replies(2): >>44383070 #>>44389219 #
turnsout[dead post] ◴[26 Jun 25 00:22 UTC] No.44383070[source]▶
[flagged]
kragen ◴[26 Jun 25 01:19 UTC] No.44383371[source]▶
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.)

replies(2): >>44383500 #>>44383946 #
1. throw10920 ◴[26 Jun 25 03:30 UTC] No.44383946[source]▶
To reinforce your point, here's a quote from the article:

> but these enforcement efforts feel perpetually behind the curve in an economy where regulatory complexity has become a competitive advantage

The only way for "regulatory complexity" to become a "competitive advantage" is for there to be very high levels of regulation.

I think that the solution isn't specifically more regulation, or less regulation, or more regulators (which would just compound the problem), but better regulation. Law should be treated like code - as a liability (not an asset), but one necessary to accomplish a purpose, and so written as carefully and simply as possible.

Where's our team of pen-testers looking to find holes in the draft of a new law? Our Unix-philosophy-adjacent lawyers proclaiming that "less is more" and striving for composability in separate laws instead of bundling everything together? Our git forge for legal documents where the public can view and comment on the legal system (even if actually making changes is more complicated)?

Software engineering and the law could learn so much from each other - it's a shame there's so little cross-pollination.