Then they should escrow all of their intellectual property and at the very least release it all to public domain the instant they stop supporting the device.
If the company goes bankrupt all IP will be released to the people. At least then motivated people can learn how to fix things.
You also diminish the expected value of the startup because the ability to liquidate IP after comercial bankruptcy is a factor reducing risk - investors get at least something back. If you dictate confiscation of that IP, you also reduce the willingness to invest in what already is a very risky proposition. And that's how you get to a 3 trillion ponzi bubble in crypto that solves no problem, while similar investment into medical startups would create thousands of products, treatments and long term wealth.
Sorry, but no amount of downvotes will make me accept a clearly populist and virtue signaling approach that will actively harm patients and discourage investment in medical innovation.
Virtue signalling? I call this "not being like dr Mengele"… if you think that's virtue signalling you are just a bad person.
He wants the patients to actually get their devices that make their lives bearable rather than these devices continuing to remain theoretical.
I am having a hard time treating investments as oxygen masks on airplanes.
Yes he did say that, but it's a false dilemma fallacy. Startups with insufficient regulation don't get you “devices that would otherwise remained theoretical”, they give you FTX and Theranos.
If you want to build a health start-up but cannot uphold basics ethical principles (like: do not abandon your patients on their own if your business plan failed), you should just seek another market.
I'm extremely glad that the types of people involved in crypto are in no way incentivised to do the same thing to the medical industry. Theranos was bad enough.
I'm not sure why you'd ever want to see crypto's web of scams and lies replicated in the medical industry. At least with crypto the harm is mainly limited to finances. When the grifters are peddling drugs and medical devices the consequences are much more dire.
> Sorry, but no amount of downvotes will make me accept a clearly populist and virtue signaling approach that will actively harm patients and discourage investment in medical innovation.
Not allowing bad actors free reign over people's health isn't populist or virtue signalling. The majority of these regulations were written in blood.
Sure, medical regulation should exist - I specifically mentioned the "primum non nocere" principle as the basis for that protection. Things like access to source code and right to repair, some guarantee the device can be removed and won't become actively harmful etc.
But some of the specific kind of regulation this article argues for are unreasonable to the point of killing the prospect of a cure.
The point of the crypto example is not that regulation is harmful, but that people respond to incentives - exactly the same investors have a choice between some sort of a MMORPG poker that is crypto versus a medical start-up. And guess what, they choose the "investment" where money is moved around and they have the chance to earn something at the loss of others, as opposed to the medical startup that could cure people but is - due to dumb regulations - more likely to lose money in the average/EV case. It's not me who brings the crypto madnesses into the medical field, it's whomever bombastically claims some irrational behavior from investors, while expecting them to foot the bill for medical innovation - that was the premiss of the comment you replied to.
When you count on the collusion of gamblers and oligopolists to take socially positive gambles you're already stuck in a dead end.