Actually, no joke, most drug companies will happily give you coupons or even free meds. They already got everything they can out of your insurance, they’ll happily bump that $700 out of pocket cost to $10.
My ex-wife once got intestinal worms. The medicine to get rid of them, which has been on the market forever, and which is on the short list of medicines that the WHO says should be freely available to everyone as a matter of public health? $800 for Americans, literally free everywhere else in the world. Apparently intestinal worms are now so uncommon in the US that the drug is only distributed in extremely small quantities, which The Invisible Hand apparently allows big pharma to charge a fortune for. I brought in the worm in a jar in case the doctors needed to identify it, and apparently so many of the doctors and nurses had never seen one that they asked us if it was alright for them to pass around to take selfies with it. LOL.
Others find their mods deactivated and drug regimens terminated when their gender subscriptions end. Several thousand “Platinum” and “Sunset Rose” gender subscribers recently found themselves in critical medical distress when Prakhet Identity Studios was bankrupted by rogue operators. In a spirit of public service, Nova Vida is generously providing a discounted, time-limited upgrade opportunity for these consumers into their similar but fuller-featured “Cordova” and “Spartan” gender products.
Second Sight’s long-term plan was always to pivot to a brain implant that would bypass the eye altogether and directly stimulate the visual cortex.
The number of blind folks who are receptive to electrical retinal stimulation was always too small for this business model. These crooks knew that and pumped investors for a non existent hope that this would somehow translate into a non existent technology. Suprise suprise, you can't magic your way into these things.
The entire operation was always doomed to turn out this way.
At a minimum, one should be able to cut off access to the internet so a company can't EoS killswitch it/pull a Nintendo and send an EoS fuck you update that breaks any attempts to put control in the user's hands
Mind, that's a really fucking low bar, and would be depressing if that's all regulation guaranteed
Yeah that bar is too low. Putting tech in someone to keep them alive or enhance their life somehow should come with some sort of permanent responsibility from somewhere. If the company goes bankrupt the expertise doesn’t just vanish, then make it a public responsibility to ensure that whoever was granted eyesight from some kind of implant, gets to keep that. Hell, make the technology and research public as well.
Bodyparts/functions should belong entirely to whomever possess them, a company going bankrupt doesn’t suddenly mean that someone should lose their ability to walk or whatever.
No company should be able to “own” someone’s bodypart, or their ability to perform a certain task or whatever. The notion is preposterous.
Those details need to be held by a 3rd party though, because if the company goes under, then the code and any critical information may become lost. Executives, employees, and other people might be fired or jump ship prior to any trigger points, so there could be no one that can be held accountable.
The FDA should hold everything necessary in escrow in perpetuity.
Why wait for the company to go under? FDA approval should mandate that the full spec and source code be open source and open to review by anyone, but especially the people in which those things are implanted and all of their medical practitioners. Medicine (and any publicly supported science in general) should never be closed off from public scrutiny.
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