bhoughto@cmdnfs.intel.com (Blair P. Houghton) (11/02/90)
Disclaimer: It says "Intel" in the "Organization" line, (and in fact also on the shirt I'm wearing :), but this posting has nothing to do with Intel or its products. In article <505@ctycal.UUCP> ingoldsb@ctycal.UUCP (Terry Ingoldsby) writes: > >In life critical applications, either the supplier, or the VAR can >perform the necessary tests and charge only those people that need >the high reliability. That is probably why medical equipment costs >*so* much. It's one of the reasons medical equipment costs that much. The others include that the manufacturer is often the only developer of the entire technology relating to a device, has a very small market over which to spread the overhead, and has a monopoly on its production, which any 1st-semester economics student will tell you leads inexorably to overpricing. Perhaps the largest factor, though, is that the FDA requires literally years of qualification and testing for many classes of medical equipment. (It used to be over seven years; for some reason I want to say it's been reduced to three; I'm not sure, though.) The costs of this would be prohibitive if a manufacturer had to price equipment using estimation standards similar to those for consumer goods. --Blair "Band Aids are kinda cheap, tho'."