Political Memes

I will always repost this article: Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported - Second Sight left users of its retinal implants in the dark

https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete

“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.

Generic person:

Well boo hoo, what did you do to get that / should've cared more / been more careful.

Later:

Boohoo, I didn't think it would affect me! Now it's serious!

If it goes in your body or is required for normal human function, it should be open source.

Everything should be open source, but let's start there.

Basic models: Starting around $1,200 to $2,000 for travel chairs.

Mid-range options: Typically between $2,500 and $5,000.

High-end models: Can exceed $10,000 for advanced features and customization.

Customized models: Prices can go up to $5,000+ for specialized needs.

Care and progress for the disabled has always been an open door for corporations to test new technology on a truly captivated audience. The absurdly high costs and exclusivity is often how the public justifies to themselves that these companies couldn't possibly have any malintent because the stakes are too high. They have no incentive to reduce costs, improve repairability, or even genuinely care about the patients or symptoms that they're treating; that's the inventor's problem.

Hey, OP, can you pass this along to the OP-OP?

https://www.os-ci.org/

It's an open source cochlear implant hearing aid as in the part that goes on to the actual physical implant.

I have a kid with L3 Autism, and let me tell ya, each individual cost might be painful but workable but they add up fast

He started speech therapy in November, the only therapy office is in a smaller town 20 miles away. My wife, fortunately, was already not working so she is able to drive him to his twice a week appointments. They told us the cost would be about $90/month with our insurance. Not horrendous but our budget has been tight on one income. A month later I start seeing the bills hit our checking account, first one, then 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc. quickly draining our entire buffer in checking. I call up the therapy place and learn it doesn't cost $100/month but $100/appointment. I say "that's over $800 a month!" And they say "that's why we bill per appointment and not per month!" Now, this is the cost until we hit the $2k individual deductible, except it's already mid-December, I have to pay for the last month of appointments and I quickly calculate out that we won't hit the deductible by the end of the year, and I'll have to pay another $2k in Jan/Feb/March to reach the deductible when costs go down to only $19/appointment or about $250 per month

So I calculate it out, figure out we have enough in savings to pay for this if we completely drain it then pass nearly the entire tax return to this damn therapy place, and mind you, this is all happening during the 6-8 months it takes to process his Medicaid eligibility. So then they say "he needs a speech tablet" and refer me to a company where it costs $800. I look into it, it's literally an iPad with an app loaded which has buttons to do speech synthesis using the iOS speech synthesis API. I identified that every app available either costs a horrendous amount up front or is a rediculous license cost per month. You no pay, your kid no longer has a voice and will probably act out more because they can't communicate their needs.

While this is all going down and I'm watching my entire savings drain away, my financial goals get set back yet another 2 years or more, he starts escaping his crib at night and beating up his sister (including a couple of times throwing a lamp at her because he wanted it on and she wanted it off so she could sleep), because that's how it goes with autistic kids sometimes. So I start looking into specialty beds that will act as a restraint. Y'know how much those cost? There's a sketchy looking company that sells some that look like coffins for around $2-4k or there's nicer ones starting at about $15k (and apparently some kids manage to completely ruin them within a year with their stimming!) so at this point I'm starting to slide into depression as I realize I'm not going to get to spend any money on fun stuff for several years while I pay for every fun new expense of having an L3 autistic kid, I saw my goals for my 30s quickly slide into my 40s or 50s.

Now the happy part! He ended up qualifying for Medicaid because for kids since they have no income they immediately qualify with an L3 Autism diagnosis. Medicaid fully paid for the therapy appointments, backdated by 3 months so it cost a couple thousand less than I had projected. I found an open source project for a web server which provides the exact same features as those $25/month speech tablet apps (and my plan was to learn Android packaging and turn it into an app to load onto a used Android tablet, a cost of about $100) and Medicaid ultimately bought the $800 tablet for him. My wife learned from a parent group on Facebook that you can get mosquito nets for like $30 on Amazon that will work as a restraint by simply putting a zip tie through the zipper so they can't unzip it at night. He also got signed up for a special Medicaid expansion that exists in my state which covers all sorts of random expenses of having a disabled child, such as door alarms, fridge locks, cameras, a fence, etc. should your kid be a flight risk like mine was (we ended up not needing nearly as much from them but I'm happy the option exists at all!) ultimately I got insanely lucky with the timing of everything, and the chaos and expenses only ultimately set me back about 1 year on my financial goals. Oh also he ended up not using the speech tablet at all after we got it and started talking (and now is about caught up with his age level for speech!) so there's that too.

Anyways the point is, someone can look at a $2k expense for specialized medical equipment and go "nah bro, that ain't that expensive!" But that $2k is probably coming after lots of other big expenses that drain even a well-funded emergency fund, and of course one's improved quality of life is gated behind that $2k expense that they're going to struggle to afford. And that's assuming the disability that put them in the market for this thing doesn't affect their ability to work, which it almost definitely does! Every person with a disability has a story like mine of this industry that exists to extract money from Medicaid and when Medicaid wisens up to being overbilled for something and drops coverage for a given thing, the companies just offer financing and leave the prices just as sky high, because what else will you do but pay up?

My wife recently got this wheelchair - https://lith-tech.com/shop/lith-tech-sc-x-smart-chair-folding-electric-wheelchair-multi-terrian-lightweight-powerchair/ - £2350

We just had a new front door fitted with a minimal threshold so she can come and go as she pleases.

This has been a life-changing purchase. The independence she didn't realise she even wanted has been liberating. Hearing her go "I'm off out, see you later!" is mind-boggling after years of dependence on all travel outside the home.

We had a grant from the NHS for 80% the cost of the chair, and the new door was £1500. Worth every penny. I expect a US equivalent to be tens of thousands of dollars, likely completely inaccessible to us.

What's really fun is we have two ruling parties, both of whom don't give a damn about right to repair, tech monopolies, or universal health care.

if anyone's interested my sisters power chair with all-terrain wheels was 45k

I think a lot of people assume that we just need Diaper Shitting Don to bite the bullet and things will get better.

Nah.

The rate at which things are getting worse might slow down, but this country is all sorts of fucked. We're going to have entire generations suffering and dying as they get older from treatable conditions because they just won't have access.

Dark future.

Fr I think the WHO, ISO, or EU (I would say or America, but we're no longer trustworthy) should put out standards for open compatability standards for assistive devices, especially implanted ones and nations should mandate that these standards be followed. They don't have to stay the same, but backwards compatability should be important. If something is implanted into your body, especially in a way that's unable to be realistically replaced and involves damaging your abilities to improve them, you have the right to keep it working and to not be bound to a single company or cartel.

Also I'm pretty sure only one state in the US mandates insurance cover hearing aids, so if you don't live there or have a union job with hearing damage, enjoy the $3k bill.

Use the "black market" whenever possible, avoid any taxes possible, and so on.

Legally, of course! I think EVERY American should respect the law EXACTLY like our President(s), CEOs, and police et al. do, as in completely.

By completely I mean not at all. In Pac-Man, or whatever.

Gee, would've been a shame if the people decide to take the means of productions from the rich snobs

Transcript:

on Tumblr:

ironbound-oberon: I have cochlear implants and I can only buy parts to fix or upgrade them from 1 corporation bc of tech exclusivity. Upgrades to get new processors for both ears cost $23k & insurance only covers 90% (and it's "good" insurance). Cyberpunk dystopia is already here for the disabled. Fight for universal healthcare, fight against capitalism NOW.

dovewithscales: I want all the abled people reading this to go price check a power wheelchair.

I used to build wheelchairs.. facts

all disability accomodation tech should be 100% free (gratis AND libre)

Dovewithscales responding to the op highlighted should have told us what the power wheel chair costs. Why should we look it up, when they clearly already did and it's the same effort for them to just post that. I don't doubt it's also insanely overvalued because we've decided to allow anticompetitive trusts run by private equity to maximize profit on treating the sick. To wring the life savings from the old for procedures that used to cost a modest reasonable sum, and to inflate health care premiums, itself a parasitical industry, to the point that a family on their own might pay 25,000/year or health insurance.

How are we not angry about this? Angrier. Is there really nothing we can do, when we haven't tried all that much?

I mean I'd gladly pay $2300 to be able to hear. I shouldn't have to, but I'm just saying.