I'm not sure I understand the metrics we could use to force companies to make things repairable. I certainly don't think it will be beneficial to make companies offer to repair _everything_ and if it's not everything, what criteria would be used to determine what is legally something the have to repair?
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.
> 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.
the US government spends twice as much as the 2nd place government on healthcare and we rank pretty abysmally on developed nations for quality of healthcare.
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.
Just to add some context. The U.S. ranks very highly in healthcare innovation, top marks in drug discovery, and highly in patient centric healthcare. The main component that you’ll see drag the U.S. down on those indexes is cost of healthcare, and that’s particularly weighed down in private insurance as opposed to Medicaid/Medicare.
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.
I would like to tack onto this that compared to what it could/should be, our maternal mortality rate is an absolute national shame.
US healthcare is uniquely bad because corporations are in charge of it rather than government.
Explain to me how the US government spends twice as much as any other country on healthcare and you claim the corporations are _more_ in charge? There are entire industries in healthcare that would disappear if the government stopped giving them money. Control via funding is far more impactful than control via laws. Companies can bend laws, they cannot survive without cash flow.
> Explain to me how the US government spends twice as much as any other country on healthcare and you claim the corporations are _more_ in charge?
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?
Of course I would, the second example represents some portion of a companies revenue. If that companies revenue is only $50 then that is their only customer and to continue existing they would need to keep that customer or they would have zero revenue. In that scenario many company's would change their entire operations to accommodate their single customer. That is control.
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.
No, my numbers were randomly picked and mean nothing other than one being greater than the other.
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 wonder how much money was in politics in 1969.
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.
Government was far more illegally corrupt in 1969 than it is now. Mayor Daly makes Mayor Adams look small time.
The corruption in American government is almost completely legal now. Citizens United, et cetera.
The legality makes it larger, but also visible.
Why not tie it to IP law? When a compamy stops repairing/supporting a product, then applicable patents are moved to public domain and the software + firmware become open source. This would ensure that there is always a strong repair market one way or another.
I agree with the basic difficulty you express, but I think there are a few clear areas to consider drawing a line in cases like this. First, mandate certain types of medical device makers publish certain types of repair information. Second, mandate that certain types of medical device must be supported for a certain amount of time, probably at least 10 years.
> what criteria would be used to determine what is legally something the have to repair?
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.
I don't know the details of this device or the manufacturer, but someone with more time on their hands should check that the company is meeting the quality system requirements of this device. A $100k exoskeleton probably has service requirements as an approved medical device from the FDA.
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...
The manufacturer in question is ReWalk, which has rebranded as LifeWard.
https://www.therobotreport.com/rewalk-robotics-rebrands-to-l...
Wikipedia still has the outdated name, in case someone here is an experienced editor.
fortunately there was no drm or intellectual property preventing him from getting the device repaired in this case
A $100k device without warranty? I don’t think the battery pictured in the article is the actual one, with 1.7Wh there’s not much walking to have, if it is that battery is like $3 on aliexpress.
Being a medical device he should file a complaint with the FDA. It won’t help his situation but the company will be forced to take notice. Absolutely despicable behavior by a company.
At least they're not threatening to sue him if he dares to fix it himself, right?
he did, as the article explains; it's not an if