To me this mostly isn’t a universal healthcare issue, it’s a right to repair issue. Everyone that reads this should support both concepts.
It’s also a medical devices being expensive in general issue. If you build something and you want it to get cleared for medical use you need to test the shit out of it and get several kinds of certification. And you need to do it all over everytime you make any change whatsoever. This can easily take two years for every change, even if you just change something trivial.
All of this is to prevent another Therac-25. For the uninitiated: That was a radiotherapy device that, due to design flaws on several levels, could inadvertantly be turned into a literal death ray. Several patients died because of this. In the aftermath, the regulations for medical decides were tightened considerably.
That’s a major part of why medical devices are so insanely expensive. Much of what you’re paying for is a titanic amount of certification work.
Unfortunately, this also makes it harder to implement a right to repair for these. Few people want to figure out who is responsible when e.g. a CPAP device that someone repaired themselves fails. The current approach is to make it damn near impossible for the manufacturers to screw up but that’s a lot harder when the device can ever be in a configuration that hasn’t been extensively tested and certified.
The fact it makes everything expensive and proprietary is just an unfortunate side effect.
I don’t buy the “testing makes it so expensive” rationale unless I see the actual source numbers. Every bicycle made in Europe, the US, or Taiwan goes through an extensive ISO-defined testing process that is every bit as rigorous as that of a hearing aid yet somehow they all arrive in shops with reasonable sticker prices, and they often have production runs with smaller numbers than those implants. Yes testing will obviously increase cost, but show me the paperwork for the process that brings a single hearing aid part to $23K. It doesn’t exist. The goldfish is merely growing to fill the bowl, and the bowl is private insurance.
all disability tech should be forced to be libre
all abandonware should be forced to be libre
YEAR OF THE LINUX EYES (Eye use Arch btw)
I will always repost this article: Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported - Second Sight left users of its retinal implants in the dark
https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete
“I remember exactly where I was: I was switching from the 6 train to the F train,” Campbell tells IEEE Spectrum. “I was about to go down the stairs, and all of a sudden I heard a little ‘beep, beep, beep’ sound.”
It wasn’t her phone battery running out. It was her Argus II retinal implant system powering down. The patches of light and dark that she’d been able to see with the implant’s help vanished.
all disability tech should be forced to be libre
all abandonware should be forced to be libre
YEAR OF THE LINUX EYES (Eye use Arch btw)
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Fucking rent
Generic person:
Well boo hoo, what did you do to get that / should’ve cared more / been more careful.
Later:
Boohoo, I didn’t think it would affect me! Now it’s serious!
Generic Republican. Leftists have empathy.
Care and progress for the disabled has always been an open door for corporations to test new technology on a truly captivated audience. The absurdly high costs and exclusivity is often how the public justifies to themselves that these companies couldn’t possibly have any malintent because the stakes are too high. They have no incentive to reduce costs, improve repairability, or even genuinely care about the patients or symptoms that they’re treating; that’s the inventor’s problem.
It also often involves ignoring us when we say what we need or want out of assistive devices. I’ve seen a lot of amputees write up essays on how artificial limbs are often designed for the wants of able people (cool technology, robotics, how similar it looks to a biological limb, etc), rather than the wants of the people wearing it (lightness, comfort, ease of use, etc). Robotics are heavy, and a lot of the robotic controls are done by flexing muscles in patterns which is inconvenient compared to a grasper hook. Meanwhile able people keep thinking that the goal should be robot strength arms like in a comic book, but a simple force body diagram will show that that just moves the point of discomfort and failure away from the prosthetic and onto the place it attaches to the body.
Designers with OEM parts: If you gotta replace your arm, might as well add a badass super-strong mech suit with guided missiles, just like in the movies.
Person who just wants to eat their soup before it gets cold: …
Basic models: Starting around $1,200 to $2,000 for travel chairs.
Mid-range options: Typically between $2,500 and $5,000.
High-end models: Can exceed $10,000 for advanced features and customization.
Customized models: Prices can go up to $5,000+ for specialized needs.
i don’t know anyone who needs a power chair who doesn’t need a customized one. try again.
My neighbor has one.
But do they need a customized one? Have you ever asked them?
wdym
Seems pretty reasonable to me, not sure what their point was. The ear implants are crazy, wheelchairs aren’t.
Seems pretty reasonable to an able-bodied person who can pull an income. A ton of disabled people cannot, and US medicaid often has disgustingly low limits.
Yeah wheelchairs look to be around hearing aid prices by that, though with much more room on both ends (yeah I know you can get dirt cheap HAs that are the auditory equivalent of reading glasses, but they’re the auditory equivalent of reading glasses)
NotAWheelchair (owned by YouTuber Jerryrig Everything) sells custom models for 1,200 to $2,000. Not sure if the customization they offer is everything you meant, but they seem to be offering some competition to the market.
should be $0
Governments should subsidize these things
and force the software to be libre
If it goes in your body or is required for normal human function, it should be open source.
Everything should be open source, but let’s start there.
Agreed.
What’s really fun is we have two ruling parties, both of whom don’t give a damn about right to repair, tech monopolies, or universal health care.
I expected them to be more than that.
Considering how dystopian this world is I expected them to be more expensive, still expensive tho
the cheapest realistic one for someone who needs an electric wheelchair is 4000, not 200.
and that has neither upper back nor neck support. it does not recline. you will get sores from it.
If you buy something for that price, I hope you have somebody who can come and get you when it fucks up and leaves you in the middle of nowhere.
I have a spare '86 VW engine, a welder, and some spare bike wheels. I will be a dangerous old person.
Reminds me as a kid a I knew a guy who had a old Chevy big block rigged up as a wood splitter. Guess he just got tired of splitting wood all the time.
Use the “black market” whenever possible, avoid any taxes possible, and so on.
Legally, of course! I think EVERY American should respect the law EXACTLY like our President(s), CEOs, and police et al. do, as in completely.
By completely I mean not at all. In Pac-Man, or whatever.
I think a lot of people assume that we just need Diaper Shitting Don to bite the bullet and things will get better.
Nah.
The rate at which things are getting worse might slow down, but this country is all sorts of fucked. We’re going to have entire generations suffering and dying as they get older from treatable conditions because they just won’t have access.
Dark future.
Fr I think the WHO, ISO, or EU (I would say or America, but we’re no longer trustworthy) should put out standards for open compatability standards for assistive devices, especially implanted ones and nations should mandate that these standards be followed. They don’t have to stay the same, but backwards compatability should be important. If something is implanted into your body, especially in a way that’s unable to be realistically replaced and involves damaging your abilities to improve them, you have the right to keep it working and to not be bound to a single company or cartel.
Also I’m pretty sure only one state in the US mandates insurance cover hearing aids, so if you don’t live there or have a union job with hearing damage, enjoy the $3k bill.
if anyone’s interested my sisters power chair with all-terrain wheels was 45k
