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Comment by balderdash | Hacker News Reader

I feel like medical practices should be like law firms where effectively non-lawyers can’t own equity and equity owners have to comply with ethics and code of conduct rules…

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Because lawyers are notoriously affordable and transparent in their pricing & quality?

There’s a reason very few guild-like professions have survived to the present day.

Most doctors don't want to be business owners. It used to be that they were kind of forced to operate in partnerships but now most choose to become employees. This might be worse for patients but for better or worse there's no going back.

Most doctors don't want to be business owners.

Then they should work for the doctors who do.

Also, I don't think they're particularly opposed to owning their practice. I can understand them not wanting to manage a business. But for that problem, they can hire professional managers. Which is basically how hospitals work; if the doctors all want the CEO replaced, he gets fired. There's a physicians board and the trustees tend to listen to it.

So you're proposing to create a privileged class of investors with MD degrees who are protected from competition and will be able to earn above-market returns on their equity? Why would we want provider organizations to have a higher cost of capital? Makes no sense at all.

Yes they will earn above market return on a lower capital base with medical shares in medical practice trading closer to book value - and the economics are the profit share not equity value of the firm. Earning $250k/yr on a $1m capital contribution requires a whole lot less rent seeking than earning the same $250k on a $5m share purchase.

If you want to look at it that way there's already a much worse problem; a "privileged class" of service providers has a government-enforced total monopoly on the market for medical practice!

Gasp! The horrors!

Can you cite - antidotally the only doctors I know that would rather be an employee work for big hospital chains or already sold their practice for a pile and are happy with less responsibility.

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