Inflation screwing you over? Just invest!

She needed a new graphics card. The salespeople there urged her to buy the brand new Nvidia 4090 for $1500.

Bruh, it's not gambling if you know you're gonna win *taps forehead meme*

Market competition is fine, but corporations are specifically obligated to focus on profits over other considerations, and in this case that is inappropriate and creates perverse incentives. Consider people like in the OP who have cynically bought in (or are in some retirement fund that bought in on their behalf) and now their financial wellbeing depends on hospitals continuing to be allowed to extract significant money out of people. Are they going to vote for candidates pushing actually effective measures to reduce how much people pay for medical care, if that means the stock will go down? Probably not.

The real issue isn't whether something is publicly traded, but collusion between groups to keep prices high. For example, it's mutually beneficial for insurance, hospitals, and medical equipment providers to increase costs. Higher equipment costs means care providers can charge more (what's another few hundred when the bill is in the thousands?

This isn't how pricing is set for medical equipment....... Nor is high equipment cost the reason behind the pricing increase.

Every hospital that accepts Medicare utilizes CMS guidelines when it comes to billing. Medicare sets the general price for items, factoring in things like historic pricing, cost of purchase from vendor, and the price of labour required to fit or make the device function.

The complex and expensive aspect of hospital billing stems from the introduction of private insurance companies. The ones that require more paperwork and processing time than Medicare, and will attempt to make the process as hard as possible.

Hospitals generally don't have direct competitors since it's prohibitively expensive to build one and there's lots of bureaucracy based on "need," so you can't just go next door to an org that's not involved in the collusion.

Because hospitals are a natural monopoly, not only are they prohibitedly expensive, but it's also extremely hard to profit from them in the long term. Which is why there's a large amount of bureaucracy to get them built.

Pretty much every ER room in America is a huge money sink that the rest of the hospital has to economically support. You add too many hospitals, and the services that are profitable get too spread across the area to support their individual ER operations.

Which is why about 10-15 years ago there was a large push from venture capital to build "hospitals" without trauma rooms. These hospitals began to eat up all the funding in the area and began shutting down hospitals with trauma wards. This is when a lot of states adopted legislation that would help curb this behavior.

There are lots of viable solutions here, but banning them from the stock market isn't going to solve anything. The first order of business imo is making everything more transparent.

Banning private insurance is the only thing that would lower prices for Americans. None of the issues you covered are even close to the reason why things are getting expensive.

Because demand and supply don't self-regulate healthcare. How much do you value your health? How about your own life? Oh, you're willing to pay ANYTHING to live? Even if it's not life threatening as long as it leaves you crippled, unable to work, you may as well be dead.

As a customer the only way to be an informed buyer is to be a physician yourself. Even if a treatment doesn't work you still get charged, no refunds!

For-profit healthcare is fundamentally inhumane and is incompatible with capitalism. The forces that would usually regulate the market are non-existant. Demand is infinite, undercutting is pointless, customers have no way to be informed.

And you should have picked a better disposable income.

Step 1. Have money

Well I guess we're fucked.

The first rule of making money: Have money.