alt Hacker NewsYes, we should apply anti-trust law to the whole system, but this doesn't really pass the smell test. First, consider what proportion of medical costs is corporate profits. Maybe 5-15% as a guess? Then, excess monopoly profits would have to be a subset of this (what, 20%?). Sure, it would be nice as a one time adjustment but it's not going to fix the problem over decades.
The problem is, with the way things are right now, it's basically impossible to tell how much is profit.
Profit, for various entities, is baked in at every level, in multiple ways that are very difficult to disentangle from the actual costs without getting real auditors on the ground with access to all the data.