Makes me wonder if in the US a trip to mexico or canada or somewhere could make this easier.
As someone with multiple "pre-existing conditions" who cares for a stroke survivor (my wife) and a stage 4 chronic kidney disease patient (my mother-in-law,) I suggest we do the following: 1. make private health insurance illegal 2. pass a Constitutional amendment allowing every human the unlimited and absolute right to buy, make, modify, and sell medical things including importing and exporting those items.
It is cheaper just to buy things than to use insurance. The stock holders need to loose all of their equity then go to prison.
The ironically terrifying evidence about what a horrible idea this is is that it was just in the news that the FDA said that recalled CPAP machines made by Philips killed 561 people: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fda-sleep-apnea-philips-recall-...
Plain old consumer device safety stuff would apply here.
The only reason there was a recall was because of the regulations and the gargantuan and slow bureaucratic apparatus surrounding Philips.
Philips tried, and would have succeeded without the regulations, to brush this off. They stalled, delated, cajoled, and lied.
Consumer protection laws (i.e. just sue after someone dies) are almost worthless in this case. No amount of rationally acting rational actor's next of kins bringing individual actions after the death of a loved one would have gotten Philips to move. Those wouldn't have even occurred because the only reason the link was made was because of a medical device monitoring system put in place by the FDA and government medical researchers looking into anomalous death statistics whose only common factor was Philips CPAP machines and the ensuing technical evaluation. Numerous deaths occurred, were attributed by some other cause because dissecting a deceased person and examining their alveoli for microscopic particles isn't an action typically performed after someone dies of what appears to be a stroke in their sleep.
Indeed, when this whole mess first started Philips deflected and delayed for years and their teams of lawyers would have annihilated each individually rationally acting rational actor's lawyers one by one to protect their bottom line drowning each litigant in delays, appeals, and litigation by financial attrition as the cases popped up one-by-one.
"Duh gubmint" is slow and often ineffective, but in this case the only reason anything happened at all and Philips CPAP machines aren't still out there literally and actually killing people is because of "a fat cat gubmint parasite" enforcing "onerous and burdensome" laws.
Of course I could be wrong. We all remember how magnanimous and ethical corporations were prior to all of these systems being put into place, don't we?
Wait. We don't?
Second, this comment would have been better without the final three paragraphs, which amounted to flame bait.
Dunking on libertarians is the moral, ethical, and honorable duty of all sentient beings.
However I don’t know enough about CPAP to judge whether you should need a doctors cert or some kind of training cert on the device. Can a CPAP harm you if you incorrectly use it / use incorrect settings?
I'm pretty sure I've never heard of a worse idea for a law. Removing any possibility of regulating the quality or efficacy of medicines and medical devices will injure and kill far more people than any resulting improved access would help.
People uses faulty medical device, however....
The idea that the law prevents me from pulling defective foam out of a device I own is terrifying.
You can't go modifying some types of medical devices and then sell them to _others_ without going through some sort regulatory process. Simple as that.