Quote:
Originally Posted by BlueSky  That being the case, why do the pump companies need to charge so much for them. |
Oh no, you've opened a pandora's box!
R&D is what they'd like to point at for where the money goes to keep their pipelines full and coming out with something new every 2 years, but then we can consider CEO salaries, lawsuit litigation from malfuctions, costs for patent protection and litiigation against other DME companies ("Can't we just all get along?" -- No! Only the paranoid survive the technology war!), salaries for employees, not to mention healthcare of their own.
I would suspect that their own employee healthcare keeps costs up, as not many "healthy" people would just so happen to choose to go into a job (such as nursing) just because they love it. It's usually a personal motivation, so the people going into those engineering/nursing/sales careers usually have a reason (such as a chronic health condition), that drives costs up even higher.
But the physical cost of manufacturing the device isn't low. If it was high, we'd never get our hands on the products for just $3K-$7K.
Infusion sets are made by hand, typically in Mexico, because of reduced labor costs. They don't cost that much to make, but when considering how much money they cost, we realize how much lawyers and CEO's get paid to keep the wheels turning.
Is it a bad thing? If we are the CEO, R&D developer, tech support person that answers the phone at 3 AM, or the person in Mexico who has a job to just barely put food on the table, then no, it's not a bad thing.
But if we're the person that works hard to live, then it's not so good. *sigh*
