> In 1994, at the height of the AIDS crisis, in which I lost several friends and a beloved employee to the disease, I started a manufacturing company in Little Elm, about 35 miles north of Dallas, to produce the first-ever automatically retracting syringe to eliminate the risk of nurses contracting HIV through accidental needle sticks. The syringe received rave reviews from nurses, hospital executives and public health officials, a major grant from the National Institutes of Health and robust private investment. But when my partners and I tried to sell it to hospitals, we were told time and time again that even though it was a better product — a lifesaving product — they weren’t able to purchase it. The primary supplier of syringes, which controlled 80 percent of the market, structured an arrangement with a vast network of hospitals that essentially closed our industry to new firms for good.<p>That last bit sentence me a bit odd. Rather than go into the details of incentives of hospitals and why they would forgo a better alternative, the author just attributes it to "monopoly". If this is true, there is some deeper misalignment with incentives in this industry that won't go away by just removing product providers that control a significant portion of the market. Or something that the author doesn't know about the industry that would make this decision make sense.