However this is really difficult and the company is struggling financially as the market is rather limited.
If you can give one person ten good years for a million in a rare disease, you can give ten people twenty good years in a less rare disease, so those tend to get more funding.
(Compared to those treatments an artificial heart is cheap.)
Those easily cost more than the average human earns in their life.
Should the public be financially burdened by outrageously expensive research and treatments for rare diseases?
When do we say, it‘s enough, your condition is not compatible with life, enjoy some palliative treatment?
Yes, precisely because they are rare and thus market forces will fail to provide a treatment.
> When do we say, it‘s enough, your condition is not compatible with life, enjoy some palliative treatment?
That will vary case by case, depending on how much the public votes in favor of socialized care vs the suffering of these people.
2. In such a case, we'd add help chip in for it. There aren't thousands of new people every day needing artificial hearts. There is certainly enough commerce in any first world country to fund such cases.
... if we could spend the same money to extend 10 lives by n years elsewhere.
It's like computers, but more life threatening :)
For this, we have insurance - to distribute the chance of utterly bad luck across all in society.
Whole (not only) western world can make such system work for a fraction of US healthcare costs, why shouldnt US?
Maybe in 5 years after some health issue or accident you will end up on sone lifelong treatment, then you may reconsider how others will help you survive.
Some Christian groups have it at the core. There's lots of those that will be happy to see others suffer.
At some point it's just playing no-true-Scotsman, while the original meaning of the word died.
When it doesn’t affect you, obviously. Maybe if some billionaire had 5 less jets, we could push medicine a little bit further and save more lives for the benefit of humanity.
Where in the world did this strange leap of logic come from? For one thing, whether most billionaires have one or more jets has nothing at all to do with medical funding (which is in any case colossal, far larger than any airplane budget of any number of billionaires).
Secondly, it's precisely the billioniares and in some cases multimillionaires who finance a lot of the more extreme tech explorations to life extension. Being fantastically rich is exceptionally conducive to wanting to live as long as possible. Any technology their funding leads to isn't going to stay bottled up for long.
More fundamentally, there seems to be a sort of odd reasoning with these arguments that if X amount of current funding for healthcare, no matter how incredibly huge, doesn't achieve Y results to fix an endless number of hard medical problems, it must be because someone is siphoning off needed funding. Considering how much funding healthcare gets already, at least allow that the problem might just be one of extremely difficult problems that won't be solved too easily regardless of how much money is thrown at them..
The reason you should want to do it if you have a functioning human soul is to lessen the suffering of others if you have the ability to do so.
So... Why don't they mention Carmat?
This article was a bit more clear: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-12/sydney-hospital-artif...