To see what would happen to American health care if it were deregulated, why not have a look at veterinary medicine?

Last week I wrote about the scammy way in which a large hospital system, Johns Hopkins, tried to bully us into paying them money we didn’t owe. The responses to it on Mastodon after a boost from Corey Doctorow were unlike anything I have received before, at least in the English language. There was a period of about a year or two, early 2020 to late 2021, when a thing I tweeted in Serbian ended up in a tabloid. Around the same time a Serbian TV station lifted an annotated covid graph I had been updating, without attribution of course. Crazy times, may they never return. Who knew that American “health” “care” “system” could arouse such strong feelings. An unexpected turn in the conversation was towards veterinary medicine and how it too is undergoing general enshittification under pressure from private equity and no regulatory barriers. Which got me thinking: could veterinary medicine serve as a proxy for what would happen to human medicine if it were to become deregulated? What would a…