Jockey Can't Walk After Manufacturer Refuses to Fix Battery in $100k Exoskeleton
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I've not thought about this problem very long, but at a glance it seems like something very difficult to get right and I don't trust my government to get even the easy things right most of the time.
The American government was capable of putting a man on the moon in 1969; private corporations in the 2020's are failing to put much smaller landers on the moon.
The government can be competent, but people have been brainwashed by corporations into believing that it can't be.
Regardless of competence, the government can certainly be trusted far more than corporations when it is profitable for them to be untrustworthy.
Can the US government be competent? Sure. Do I trust it to be competent today when it's dropping the ball on arguably it's most important task? No, not at all.
I can stop giving corporations my money, I don't need to trust them.
Whether that cost is entirely good or bad is up for debate, as U.S. doctors get paid twice as much and perform twice as many interventions. First place countries usually have costs around 4K per person on healthcare. Other top countries around 6-7k, and the U.S. is at 10k.
But it is worth coloring exactly what we’re talking about when we say “abysmal rankings” because some folks might weigh the innovation and patient centered scores higher than the cost score.
Total spending by government is an irrelevant metric for judging who is more "in charge".
Imagine two people, one of them spends X hours and $10 doing their own gardening to grow 100 tomatoes, someone else spends X hours driving to a shop and spends $50 to buy 100 tomatoes. You surely wouldn't argue that the second person has more control vs. companies over their tomatoes because they spent 5x as much, would you?
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with the first example. Are you suggesting the government would be 5x more cost efficient at producing tomatoes?! That's almost as outlandish to me as suggesting someone would spend the same amount of time driving to get tomatoes as someone else could spend growing them.
My point is that the person growing tomatoes themselves has much more control over the tomatoes than someone who buys them from a shop, even if it costs them more money to buy from the shop.
Me being the shop's only buyer of tomatoes means I have greater control over the shop than if there were 100 buyers, it doesn't mean I have more control over the tomatoes than growing my own. And what we care about is control over healthcare, not control over registered companies related to healthcare (that's just a proxy for control over healthcare - aka tomatoes).
Or imagine these two examples (again, hypothetical):
Government A builds their own hospital and runs it using government employees, their budget is $10M/year.
Government B contracts Company Y to build and run a hospital, they sign a contract saying "we will pay you $20M/year to run it, and no oversight needed - good luck, have fun".
You clearly couldn't call Gov B the one with more control over their hospital, could you? Even though they spent twice as much on it.
Sure, no government signs a contract that simple, I'm not trying to describe a nation's situation, just pointing out that "spending more money" does not equal "having more control".
I have the cynical view that the government gives contracts not to the lowest bidder (that would be generous), but rather, whoever is going to give the greatest kickback to the re-election campaigns of the people deciding who to give a contract to.
Government isn't incompetent, it's corrupt.
The corruption in American government is almost completely legal now. Citizens United, et cetera.
The legality makes it larger, but also visible.
In the EU it’s just set at 2 years. Anything you buy has to last at least 2 years or the manufacturer has to repair, replace, or refund.
The Netherlands takes this further and says it must be supported for as long as one would reasonably expect it to last.
In the article he says he was specifically told they don’t support any product after 5 years, which I do not think anyone would assume to be the max lifetime for a $100k device.
the relevant regulation is here, but you would need to find the requirements for the particular device: https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFR...
https://www.therobotreport.com/rewalk-robotics-rebrands-to-l...
Wikipedia still has the outdated name, in case someone here is an experienced editor.