Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported (ieee.org) 212
Second Sight left users of its retinal implants in the dark. IEEE Spectrum reports: Barbara Campbell was walking through a New York City subway station during rush hour when her world abruptly went dark. For four years, Campbell had been using a high-tech implant in her left eye that gave her a crude kind of bionic vision, partially compensating for the genetic disease that had rendered her completely blind in her 30s. "I remember exactly where I was: I was switching from the 6 train to the F train," Campbell tells IEEE Spectrum. "I was about to go down the stairs, and all of a sudden I heard a little 'beep, beep, beep' sound." It wasn't her phone battery running out. It was her Argus II retinal implant system powering down. The patches of light and dark that she'd been able to see with the implant's help vanished.
Terry Byland is the only person to have received this kind of implant in both eyes. He got the first-generation Argus I implant, made by the company Second Sight Medical Products, in his right eye in 2004 and the subsequent Argus II implant in his left 11 years later. He helped the company test the technology, spoke to the press movingly about his experiences, and even met Stevie Wonder at a conference. "[I] went from being just a person that was doing the testing to being a spokesman," he remembers. Yet in 2020, Byland had to find out secondhand that the company had abandoned the technology and was on the verge of going bankrupt. While his two-implant system is still working, he doesn't know how long that will be the case. "As long as nothing goes wrong, I'm fine," he says. "But if something does go wrong with it, well, I'm screwed. Because there's no way of getting it fixed."
Ross Doerr, another Second Sight patient, doesn't mince words: "It is fantastic technology and a lousy company," he says. He received an implant in one eye in 2019 and remembers seeing the shining lights of Christmas trees that holiday season. He was thrilled to learn in early 2020 that he was eligible for software upgrades that could further improve his vision. Yet in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, he heard troubling rumors about the company and called his Second Sight vision-rehab therapist. "She said, âWell, funny you should call. We all just got laid off,'" he remembers. "She said, 'By the way, you're not getting your upgrades.'" These three patients, and more than 350 other blind people around the world with Second Sight's implants in their eyes, find themselves in a world in which the technology that transformed their lives is just another obsolete gadget. One technical hiccup, one broken wire, and they lose their artificial vision, possibly forever.
Terry Byland is the only person to have received this kind of implant in both eyes. He got the first-generation Argus I implant, made by the company Second Sight Medical Products, in his right eye in 2004 and the subsequent Argus II implant in his left 11 years later. He helped the company test the technology, spoke to the press movingly about his experiences, and even met Stevie Wonder at a conference. "[I] went from being just a person that was doing the testing to being a spokesman," he remembers. Yet in 2020, Byland had to find out secondhand that the company had abandoned the technology and was on the verge of going bankrupt. While his two-implant system is still working, he doesn't know how long that will be the case. "As long as nothing goes wrong, I'm fine," he says. "But if something does go wrong with it, well, I'm screwed. Because there's no way of getting it fixed."
Ross Doerr, another Second Sight patient, doesn't mince words: "It is fantastic technology and a lousy company," he says. He received an implant in one eye in 2019 and remembers seeing the shining lights of Christmas trees that holiday season. He was thrilled to learn in early 2020 that he was eligible for software upgrades that could further improve his vision. Yet in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, he heard troubling rumors about the company and called his Second Sight vision-rehab therapist. "She said, âWell, funny you should call. We all just got laid off,'" he remembers. "She said, 'By the way, you're not getting your upgrades.'" These three patients, and more than 350 other blind people around the world with Second Sight's implants in their eyes, find themselves in a world in which the technology that transformed their lives is just another obsolete gadget. One technical hiccup, one broken wire, and they lose their artificial vision, possibly forever.
That's socialized medicine for ya! (Score:5, Funny)
well um,ah...
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This problem would have, and actually did still happen in socialized health care systems. The problem was the company that made it went bust. Do you think any of the European health agencies started making copies of the device or picked up support for it? Of course not. A French patient with this prosthetic is just as screwed as anyone else. The article says there are over 350 users world wide. Some of those are definitely going to be from single payer systems.
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Why bother delivering the goods when you don't get punished by just fooling everyone?
Public services, monopolies, same end result.
Re:That's socialized medicine for ya! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That's socialized medicine for ya! (Score:5, Interesting)
the US is ranked #1 by far in innovation. https://freopp.org/united-stat... [freopp.org]
Re: That's socialized medicine for ya! (Score:4, Informative)
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Second line of linked article:
"America’s runaway leadership in science & technology is marred by a fiscally unsustainable system of costly health care."
Also, leadership in innovation does not mean that others do not innovate.
Re:That's socialized medicine for ya! (Score:5, Informative)
the US is ranked #1 by far in innovation. https://freopp.org/united-stat... [freopp.org]
The US is ranked #6 in innovation, but #1 in the "Science and Technology" category used to rank innovation across the medical industry. We don't even score that highly in two of the subcategories within Science and Technology, but we blow every country away in Scientific Discoveries. This measure is made up of two metrics: the number of Nobel Laurates in Chemistry or Medicine, and the number of citations in research documents.
When it comes to actual medical advances from that research, we are not #1. For instance, Switzerland (#1 in overall innovation) scores 23% higher in medical advances.
The United States may have the best universities creating ground breaking research, but as for useable medical advances from that research we are a strong player but not nearly the best.
Re:That's socialized medicine for ya! (Score:4, Insightful)
LOL.
Clicked on the link you provided and the headline for the article is "United States: #6 in the 2021 World Index of Healthcare Innovation" so even your linked article invalidates your argument.
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We do. It's conducted privately, and primarily marketed in US because you can actually market a ~500k 12 (yes twelve total) pixel vision system for retinitis pigmentosa and actually get some people to buy it.
You know, the implant in the story.
And even make enough to try for a 60 (yes, sixty total) pixel upgrade later. You know, the second version of implant in the story.
Any sane public system would declare this "non viable due to high cost and low impact". Something they do as a matter of routine to novel t
Re: That's socialized medicine for ya! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: That's socialized medicine for ya! (Score:5, Interesting)
It should be stipulated that all medical implant patents where an implant breaks down and the replacement/repair is no longer available, for any reason, including over-pricing of implant or procedure - be either replaced, at cost to the patent holder, with identical or better implants which may be available OR that the said patent is immediately released into public domain.
You wanna use humans as guinea pigs and gamble with their lives? Fine.
Just put your livelihood up as a gambling chip.
And no, that would not stifle competition and creativeness.
In a case such as that, either the patent holder has given up on the patent already and it is simply languishing until the duration of patent protection runs out...
OR the said patent holder is withholding it from the public in order to patent troll.
Cause if it were a successful patent, replacements and repairs would be readily available.
Re: That's socialized medicine for ya! (Score:4, Insightful)
Conjoined twins? Come to America. No one else can separate them. Got a fetal heart tumor? Need to operate in utero? Come here again, no one else can. Got cancer? Who made your chemo drugs?
A very simple google search shows otherwise.
Re: That's socialized medicine for ya! (Score:3)
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Yes they are available.
Socialised medicine does sell things on the open market. What do you think Cooperative Socialism is about? The government purchase of teaspoons?
Re:That's socialized medicine for ya! (Score:5, Informative)
Yes.
You do realise that replacing implants isn't the same thing as replacing a light bulb? It requires a major surgery and it may very well be that the surgery required to insert the current implants might have made a replacement too difficult.
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Sounds like an interesting problem for Adam Jensen. [fandom.com]
Re:That's socialized medicine for ya! (Score:5, Informative)
See the full list of recently available retinal implants here: https://eyewiki.aao.org/Retina... [aao.org]
Second Sight were partially publicly funded, through a 6.4 million dollar grant from the NIH. If you paid taxes, you helped fund this failed company. And you don't get the end product. Are you happy with that? https://www.businesswire.com/n... [businesswire.com]
Yes, socialized medicine has developed retinal implants. Yes they are available to Americans, and on the free market. No, you can not remove a retinal implant and implant another with much of a success rate. It was not the hardware price that bankrupted the company, it was greedy, incompetent management. Another win for socialism, another failure for capitalism.
Re:That's socialized medicine for ya! (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would EU need an equivalent "bionic" eye. Before the company folded Second Sight was approved for sale in the US, Canada and the EU.
Second Sight has received regulatory approvals to offer the device in the U.S., Canada and the European Union. Patients have received the device in the U.S. and 10 other countries
https://www.latimes.com/busine... [latimes.com]
You REALLY don't seem to understand "socialized" medicine. Most countries with universal healthcare get their supplies from private industries. It isn't like the government researches, develops, manufactures and distributes all of the various equipment used to treat patients.
Re:That's socialized medicine for ya! (Score:5, Interesting)
Socialized medicine would not have this problem ... because socialized medicine wouldn't have created the innovation in the first place.
Absent the technology parade of fuckfaces who just want to make a profit and don't actually care about outcomes in any way other than how they affect the bottom line of the balance sheet, the money would be channeled into Universities where the research could be done, and would wind up benefiting more people and not less. This was how medical research was done before corporations took over, and it's how it should be done again.
Perhaps a regulatory solution is to require the code and schematics for abandoned medical devices to be open-sourced.
100% of the company's documentation must be held in escrow to ensure that the necessary information is retained, and they must pay for it. Anything else is rubberstamping the current shituation.
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Socialized medicine would not have this problem ... because socialized medicine wouldn't have created the innovation in the first place.
Perhaps a regulatory solution is to require the code and schematics for abandoned medical devices to be open-sourced.
Right. They are left in the same state they were before the implants. Blind.
These are the risks we take with a for profit healthcare system. A company might give you something that will allow you to see, or save your life. But if they go bankrupt, you're blind, and maybe even dead.
Just a choice that societies have to make. We makes our choices, and we live with them.
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Aside from the fact that socialized medicine in Europe has done plenty of this kind of pioneering work, I think there is a good case for doing a lot more of it.
Globally around â40bn is spent on healthcare research. New drugs, new treatments. That's not all that much for groups of developed nations like the EU. We could have research driven by need rather than profit, creating treatments that are available to the world at cost.
The main reason it doesn't happen is lobbying from pharma companies who don't
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Aside from the fact that socialized medicine in Europe has done plenty of this kind of pioneering work, I think there is a good case for doing a lot more of it.
Yep.
I'm also fairly sure that socialized medicine wouldn't create something that "powered down" if the company went broke and turned off the server (or whatever it was that the company did to cause this).
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Aside from the fact that socialized medicine in Europe has done plenty of this kind of pioneering work, I think there is a good case for doing a lot more of it.
Yep.
I'm also fairly sure that socialized medicine wouldn't create something that "powered down" if the company went broke and turned off the server (or whatever it was that the company did to cause this).
Can you imagine? There are people standing up for for-profit medicines using as an example, a company that thought it was a business move to turn people's devices off, no warning, and not caring if the users might be killed doing it.
That's a hellava example for them to use as an example of what for profit medicine brings the world.
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Well, to them, it's a wonderful example of their Libertarian views. It's fine for a company to hold its users hostage or kill them off when it becomes unprofitable to keep them alive, because Freedom. And freedom matters more to them than the lives of others. Not their own lives, I would point out, just others. Preferably people in other places or people they have no real likelihood of knowing. Numbers are just numbers and names are just words that you can scratch off, unless it's personal or a foetus. (For
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zero capacity for anything other than growing like a tumour
I think of it more like a parasite than a tumor. At least with the proper stimulation a parasite will eventually leave its host, hopefully without killing it.
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Yes, isn't this example alone enough to condemn the US system permanently?
What's next? The terms of use for your pacemaker have changed. Either agree or have your service disconnected?
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This is just another form of "never, ever buy a "subscription" or otherwise dependent upon a 3rd party solution to any serious issue. Not hardware, not software, not service. If you don't get the whole shooting match with your initial purchase, you're just going to get (metaphorically) shot later on.
Subscriptio
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Yep.
I'm also fairly sure that socialized medicine wouldn't create something that "powered down" if the company went broke and turned off the server (or whatever it was that the company did to cause this).
The context suggests that the company did not "do" anything to cause the device shutdown, given that other devices are still working. It appears that the company cannot (or will not, this is unclear) service an implant that has a problem, so if/when it fails, so long vision. This is absolutely a big problem, but it does not appear to be the case that some malicious asshole that flipped a switch and blinded people.
I'm rather amazed (though I shouldn't be) that the bulk of the comments here are screaming ab
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Aside from the fact that socialized medicine in Europe has done plenty of this kind of pioneering work, I think there is a good case for doing a lot more of it.
Yes, the idea that unless there is a profit to be made, nothing will be done is a meme - a really bad one.
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Yes, the idea that unless there is a profit to be made...
I don't understand this mindset. Are there actually people out there that think companies don't make money in a socialized environment? Or are they just mad that those companies aren't as easily able to generate obscene profits? Or merely of the belief that all government is bad, and we should just leave these precious business alone to continue their oft-demonstrated altruistic ways?
Re: That's socialized medicine for ya! (Score:5, Informative)
"and we live with them" or die because of them. Nothing like dying for some bean counter's math.
Remember Sarah Palin's "death panels" that would happen if we went to a single payer system?
That dumbass didn't know that's what our for profit system had for years.
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That dumbass didn't know that's what our for profit system had for years.
Yep. And it's what we still have in the USA under the ACA, where insurance companies are written into the law and their profits capped to a percentage of expenditures on treatment. This means they're motivated to push treatment prices higher — they are required to spend 80% of premiums on medical care, so if the cost of medical care goes up then they get more profit.
Re: That's socialized medicine for ya! (Score:5, Insightful)
Socialised systems make this math every year because of triage. There's not enough exotic, novel and very expensive treatments to go around. Every year, there's a budged and there'a cut-off beyond which solutions are no longer funded.
For example, cancer patients are often in this category, where most exotic and difficult to treat cancer patients are simply given hospice care. And there are known cases where such patients elect to take money, go abroad and get treatment there in the for-profit private clinic that can fund this care with money being paid by the patient.
The main difference between the for profit and socialized is who is the one that is left without care. In socialized systems, it's whoever is too expensive to treat to keep the system working within budgetary constraints. In private, it's whoever can't afford to pay for the treatment, regardless if its cheap or expensive.
And the biggest problem is, how do you fund novel, extremely expensive treatments for things that couldn't be treated before? Socialized systems have to make the call to pay for the treatment from the common purse, which means you have to actually justify reducing quality of treatment for everyone else just to treat this novel and expensive thing. I.e. how many hundreds of ventilators and people trained to operate them do we not get into hospitals so we can afford to pay for this new ocular implant for a small handful of people.
Like all things in life, this is a matter of choosing between two things. Private system, due to it serving ultra-rich people allows for very novel and expensive treatments that almost no one will ever need. Be it exotic cancers or ocular implants. But it will mean that poor of the society will have problems getting anything beyond the most basic emergency treatment, barring a tiny handful of very specific exceptions. Public system excels at that last point, but it means that if your illness is very uncommon, it's unlikely to be funded even for existing very expensive treatments, and this system will almost certainly not fund some expensive experimental procedure barring a tiny handful of very specific exceptions.
So in the end, both systems make people die because of some bean counter's math. That is not the thing you can choose not to have.
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Well, ish. There's a budget but the NHS has no issues with the world's most expensive drugs because it doesn't have to purchase many of those. They treat very rare conditions, so form a negligible line item.
It was easier when health tourism was allowed, because foreign patients would spend so much money in hospital shops that they more than paid for the medical procedures needed. There was a net flow of money in, despite charging nothing for the procedures and only prescription charges for medicines.
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First of all, have you read the story about the implant in question yet? You should. It's so experimental, that even FDA won't approve it to be paid for by others. Much less something like NHS approving to fund something that experimental, with that bad of results.
Second, do you realise that there's a cutoff where medicines are not awarded coverage in NHS budget? And that there are bean counters who sit on those meetings telling people making decisions that this is their budget, and so they have to do the m
Re: That's socialized medicine for ya! (Score:5, Interesting)
A relative of mine is currently getting a brand new, very expensive cancer treatment. The company that developed it partnered with the NHS (socialized healthcare). The deal is basically that the NHS gets the treatment cheap and the company gets to run trials.
In fact the NHS has a lot of bargaining power when it comes to cost. Treatments that are extremely expensive for private healthcare systems are often quite cheap for the NHS. The drug companies hate it because the NHS price sets a benchmark that all the insurance companies want too. It's one of the reasons why access to UK healthcare is being demanding as part of a future trade deal between brexit Britain and the US.
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If they needed treatment that they couldn't afford, they would have to check if they can afford hospice care instead.
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"Socialized systems have to make the call to pay for the treatment from the common purse, which means you have to actually justify reducing quality of treatment for everyone else just to treat this novel and expensive thing."
Yes, the ideal implementation of "insurance". Any deviation from this is worse.
"... how many hundreds of ventilators and people trained to operate them do we not get into hospitals so we can afford to pay for this new ocular implant for a small handful of people."
How is that different
Re:That's socialized medicine for ya! (Score:5, Insightful)
You're divorced from reality. It's convenient though, because it's easier to keep your almost religious fanaticism about corporate superiority when facts don't impinge.
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Yes, of course, and the opinion he expresses is not supported by fact but only personal bias. ShanghaiBill is a full-bore "exploit others for personal profit" kind of person. Therefore, it is only natural that he assume that a system based on his personal values must be best. Very important what side of the tracks he was born on.
Re:That's socialized medicine for ya! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That's socialized medicine for ya! (Score:4, Informative)
We have socialized medicine in the UK and it invents plenty of stuff. It also partners with private companies and universities to invent stuff.
Same goes for most of Europe.
Re:That's socialized medicine for ya! (Score:5, Insightful)
Same goes for most of Europe.
The same goes for almost every country with reasonable amounts of money, not just Europe. Caping profits to within reason is what most of the world does because of some kind of socialized care, including where most of the research and development comes from. The pay up or die American model is thought to be the superior model by mostly just Americans.
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The NHS was fine until we voted in a government that decided to defund it.
The issue is really one of how British democracy works, or rather doesn't work. When it was working well the waiting times for emergency treatment were low.
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Ah yes, the legend of "defunded NHS", where NHS never had a budget reduction in decades. Yet it's somehow "defunded". By increasing its budgets every year without fail.
Can I be defunded like NHS please?
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Strangely, the NHS doesn't do much research in Austria or Germany, and Russia isn't in the EU. Russia also isn't socialist and never has been.
The MRI scanner was a British university invention, paid for out of research grants by the British government. If you would like the US to return all MRI scanners to the UK, after all you can't possibly want to be tainted with Socialist inventions, then we'd be fine with that. You get to pay postage, because - after all - you're the ones who love paying for everything
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>Same goes for most of Europe.
Me talking about Europe.
Next anglo poster:
>Strangely, the NHS doesn't do much research in Austria or Germany, and Russia isn't in the EU.
I'm not sure if it's your anglo supremacism i.e. "but British invented MRI, no it's not relevant to either the implant in question or the differences between socialised and private medicine but I'm going to pound my chest in supremacist fervour anyway!" that makes you stupid, or your ignorance of basic geographics, such as what countries
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"Fun part: most of this research is privately funded."
So there's no structural difference to explain why private and public systems would differ in innovation. Thanks for making that clear!
"All are private."
All. ALL. ALL. Sure.
" I know several people who had to take loans from their relatives to get treated in them once the public system just told them "we have nothing but slow death left to offer you. But you can try enrolling into that experimental treatment that isn't covered by the public purse"."
So,
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How long does it take to get non-emergency treatments nowadays? How long does it take to get a non-emergency medically required surgery in most cases?
I don't know, how long does it take? How does that compare, on average, between socialized and non-socialized medicine? Non-anecdotal evidence would be nice.
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Intellectual property. It's worth money.
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Intellectual property. It's worth money.
Intellectual property. It's notional and cannot exist without government protection, and we are the government.
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Isn't going to do much in this case. This is a very much pre-alpha level hardware and software. They specifically mention that quality of vision is so low, that many people don't actually end up using their implants all that much. First version has a total of 12 black and white electrodes and second one is 60 black and white pixels. Effects also apparently vary wildly, with some people reporting it utterly useless and others reporting that they can tell apart things enough to figure out if there's a pedestr
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Socialized medicine would not have this problem ... because socialized medicine wouldn't have created the innovation in the first place.
So the USA is the only country doing innovative medical research? Got it. Given the vast majority of the planet has some form of socialized healthcare that is doubtful.
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And look no further than COVID vaccines to find a counter-example.
Re: That's socialized medicine for ya! (Score:2)
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Socialized medicine would not have this problem ... because socialized medicine wouldn't have created the innovation in the first place.
Yeah that's just not true. I know a lot of people want to make 'government' a dirty word, but the government, not the private sector, leads innovation. Tech sees massive... and I mean massive public funding. All the results are associated with private business, because they make the products and take all the profit from it. Public funding, private profit.
We do it for national security, and to give US businesses an edge over those in other countries. And many of these projects are specifically aimed at are
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Liar.
https://www.spiegel.de/gesundh... [spiegel.de]
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Socialised medicine has created plenty of innovative products and certainly would have created such a device because it's cheaper to fix a problem once rather than to continually sell assistance the way for-profit medicine prefers to work.
To answer the question in a later post of whether similar products are available in the EU...
https://ec.europa.eu/research-... [europa.eu]
http://www.vision-research.eu/... [vision-research.eu]
The answer is yes, and have been since 2013.
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Thank you for saying how it really is. I would add that single-payer is the ultimate insurer because it has the largest possible base.
I support single-payer, unlike you, but at least you offer the one true reason to oppose it. To make single-payer effective steps would need to be taken to ensure the problem you identify is addressed. Seeing what is happening with the Post Office, we cannot take it for granted. We are conditioned to think that government can do not good. Thanks, Reagan.
Another advantage
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While you have a point about politicians being in charge of the budget, at least here in Canada, it is political suicide to attempt to defund the healthcare and likewise a good way to win an election is to promise more funding. People love their public healthcare, especially the older people who tend to vote more.
Seems private would also be under pressure to cut funding to please the stock holders as well.
The big problem is the cost of health care increases faster then inflation, new drugs, new ways to diag
Did they learn nothing from Star Trek? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Did they learn nothing from Star Trek? (Score:5, Informative)
I realize you are trying for a humorous post but it looks like they did learn from Star Trek. You need a visor (well glasses actually but close enough). The glasses have a camera that provides an image to a processor that then sends the low res interpreted image to the "eye" wirelessly. The only real difference is that in Star Trek Geordi had the processors in the visor and they needed physical contact to the implants in his temple to send the image to his brain.
Other companies (Score:2)
Aren't their other companies making similar products?
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Even if there are, just how often do you want to undergo a major surgical operation just because some company that made some bits that you depend on for living/quality of life has gone out of business, been bought, or simply came up with a new product and dropped support for the old one?
Re: Other companies (Score:2)
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Yes, mentioned in the story.
Second Sight may have given up on its retinal implant, but other companies still see a need—and a market—for bionic vision without brain surgery. Paris-based Pixium Vision is conducting European and U.S. feasibility trials to see if its Prima system can help patients with age-related macular degeneration, a much more common condition than retinitis pigmentosa.
Daniel Palanker, a professor of ophthalmology at Stanford University who licensed his technology to Pixium, sa
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Yes, over in Europe. But it doesn't sound like these are Europeans.
In the US, possibly, but corporate monopolies over niche industries is common practice there, surgery would cost the patient tens of thousands they can't earn because they're now blind, and that's really not a productive way to maintain such technology.
Now, if protocols, interfaces, etc, were all standardised by some medical equivalent of the IETF, it would be easier because the users could switch between providers. As it is, they're locked
If ever there was a case for open-source... (Score:5, Insightful)
...this is it.
'Nuff said.
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can be serviced as required indefinitely independently from the services, prices, and even existence of the manufacturing company.
If open-sourcing hardware and software isn't enough to make this possible, then there's not really a legislative solution either.
You'll never get congress on board to mandatory open sourcing, of course. But mandatory royalty-free licensing when the owning company can no longer service the products would be a way around it. That way, they can be bought out and the new owners can still use the IP and once they do, they can recall the licensing for themselves again. National governments would need the power
Re: That may not do much (Score:3)
paging Mr. Musk (Score:5, Insightful)
There's fantastic IP for sale that may play into Nuralink, and it would be a chance to burnish your public persona further.
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There's fantastic IP for sale that may play into Nuralink, and it would be a chance to burnish your public persona further.
https://www.kcra.com/article/e... [kcra.com] Perhaps like his monkeys, if it doesn't work out, these people can be euthanized?
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Nuralink isn't going so well. More than half the monkeys died, many of the surviving ones are in pretty bad shape.
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The monkeys were slated for destruction, because they had problems. So the question is, did Neuralink kill them, or did they die of whatever was going to kill them anyway?
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Never forget what happened to Peter Tork!
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Never forget what happened to Peter Tork!
Michael Nesmith had it worse!
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How many would that be?
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Ugh Nasty Right to Repair case example. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Brain: Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
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Why the hell you need a server for something local?
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Farmers seem to think they should be able to fix their tractors without depending on John Deere. However, this is an entirely new level ...
The tech still work (Score:2)
If the company does go bankrupt but the technology is good, I would expect some other, maybe better run company to buy the rights.
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Technology is crappy though. That's one of the problems. Read the story. This appears to be a dead end in this kind of development, with competitors focusing on more common eye problems and different types of solutions that are expected to produce better results.
your pacemaker is out of date pay $9999 or die! (Score:2)
your pacemaker is out of date pay $9999 or die!
Re: (Score:2)
A month. $9999 a month.
- Martin Shkreli
forgot 4 or 5 (Score:2)
4. just show up at the ER for an temp fix over and over again. Even if you can't pay they must still see you.
5. Become an inmate and then the state will be forced to cover the bill as it's cruel and unusual punishment to not cover medical needs.
Gates, Bezos, etc.. (Score:2)
Public money can't fund goal based research (Score:2)
Similar boat (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Apparently, you don't need to have meaningful conversations with other homo sapiens so long as you're able to consume the latest Taylor Swift.
Best of luck with the open source project!
Btw, if there was ever an opportune time to shamelessly plug your project, this would be it
I'm usually not in favour of new laws but... (Score:3)
there should be some sort of a legislation which forces companies to support medical devices indefinitely. Otherwise, you're potentially handing someone a delayed death sentence.
Bankruptcy court (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
That helps, but what if nobody wants to buy it? Obviously the two people with the implant would, but they may not have the money and/or skills to maintain it. So they are still stuck.
Hard to see the future (pun intended) (Score:3)
I looked at the title and said "oh, no another greedy company, doing...", but then I realized the company was *not* greedy enough, and they went bankrupt.
I don't know how to respond. If they had more customers, or charged higher prices, obviously they would not have gone bankrupt. However both of them are bad options (asking more people to be blind, or extracting more money from blind people).
The problem is, it is such a niche area, and requires so much technical and medical expertise, there is a huge mismatch. Apparently, no other company is doing it, so it is not financially viable. Government is not doing it either, meaning it is not politically important. And unlike diabetics, who hack their insulin pumps with open source, there is not even community interest in this.
All being said, the situation stinks. Nobody will rise up to take over the operations of this company, and these people are left with a once in a lifetime miracle, slowly fading away.
Re: (Score:2)
So they're basically holding their customers hostage and threatening to blind them for life unless their demands for payment are met. And it's entirely legal.