this is awesome but you know, anyone still wondering why healthcare eats up more and more of GDP

Not that I’ve looked at the math or anything, it’s 2:40 am and no. But unless there’s a digit missing in that pricing, the health economics of that thing have got to be a total slam-dunk. I don’t doubt the payor resisted paying because resisting payment is what payors do. If it’s a novel device that isn’t on approved formulary lists, which probably if new thing and not many candidates, that alone is plenty for at least one line of nope. It doesn’t require an actual rational objection based on the value proposition. SOP would be bog-standard automatic bureaucratic obstructionism framed as a best practice in cost consciousness. It’s only a story because someone got pissed off enough to deploy the courts and a journalist thought the device looked cool.

Try pricing five days in the critical care unit on a ventilator for a dying eighty-seven-year-old with advanced dementia, heart failure, and chronic kidney disease, found short of breath and tachycardic in bed at the nursing home, rushed to the hospital, and admitted with sepsis and pulmonary edema. Including imaging and cath lab. Then get back to me about unjustifiable Cadillac expenditures on luxurious medical devices that enable (a very small number of) paralyzed people with normal life expectancies to walk again, for less than it costs to put a remote monitoring device into a heart failure patient’s chest, which, statistically, costs less than *not* doing that because it reduces hospitalizations by just a tad.