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Comment by nemo44x | Hacker News Reader

What’s a fair price? Spending well over $20k on dental work over a lifetime is easy for many people. Adjust for inflation and it’s a steal. Cavities often lead to eventual root canals which require a crown which one day will probably require an extraction and a dental post and prosthetic tooth. That is probably around $8k or more for a single tooth at todays rates.

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If this is such a revolutionary technology and it is cheap to mass produce, it should be like water fluoridation and similar state funded measures that increase overall population health. I am not arguing that $20k is more than regular dental work's cost over a lifetime, in the US at least, but that it's because dental work is so expensive is why oral health is so bad worldwide,Lifestyle, sugar consumtion and the like notwithstanding.

Maybe it ought to be that way. But we believe in property rights and government confiscation of property isn’t something I support.

Might be the pols manage to find a way to buy the tech to give away freely to the people. Until then it’s theirs to distribute as they please until their exclusive rights expire.

I wasn't talking about confiscation, although expropriation and similar measure are common when done for a public good. Anyway in this case I think the whole product is bogus and it's mostly VC bait.

The time-value of money means the adjustment goes the other way. $20k is absolutely insane. That’s three times the cost of a full orthodontic treatment. They’ll get a handful of customers, if that.

$2k is more likely as a price point for mass adoption.

$20k is likely the price for early adopters, while production rates are low. Within a year or three the price would likely fall to some stable long-term rate. $2k indeed sounds about right.

Healthcare (including dental) costs have outpaced inflation though. The price of all those procedures is likely to increase more than inflation.

Similar to how it would be a bargain to have paid for a college education today 20 years ago.

The average American probably spends about 20k in their lifetime, that's probably where they got their pricing from. They get a check-up a year and a handful of fillings with some prosthetics if they live long enough. Which totals to around 20k.

The average American also cannot afford 20k in one shot they can't even afford 2k.

thats not the way this works. Paying $20k over a lifetime vs an up front $20k payment means the up front $20k payment also includes the opportunity cost of the interest made - your up front payment of $20k is much more valuable than $20k over 60 or 70 years. That same $20k might be a large part of a downpayment on a mortgage and you'd get back many more times the value than if you spent it on your teeth all at once.

Right but the price of dental work goes up in price over time too. And healthcare has dramatically outpaced inflation.

Sure, but you're literally throwing an opportunity to own property which historically is the best possible return to get preventive work done on your teeth. And not all healthcare is the same, so I'm not even sure dental costs are rising at the same rate as "healthcare".

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