There is a big problem with health care in most countries that I've been living into for extended periods of time (France, Italy and to a lesser extent Germany).
Anything sorrounding "medical" and/or "health care" has a 10x-100x price blowup, for absolutely no reason. I'm not even speaking about surgery, I can start by phisiotherapy consumables, such as elastic bands. Elastic bands are used in phisical rehab. They are dirt cheap, usually, if you buy them inside a child play store. But behold, if you buy the same stuff from "Thera Band", which is officially sold to hospitals and clinics, a couple of meters of the stuff will cost you 20-30 times more. I worked as an assistant in a phisical rehab clinic for several years, and this kind of bullshit is amazing, because it goes for everything (air balls, plastic rods for balancing excercises, and so on). The price inflation goes even higher with actual machines.
There is a machine which is called "Rehab 3xxxx" (produced by a clinic around here which I helped develop, so I won't disclose the details), which is just a linear actuator which moves back and forth. Literally, nothing more. There is an embedded controller which allows to tune the extension limits, and a couple of ABS plastic accessories that hold to the knee, wrist, etc.
The idea is just to move the articulation, and/or rotate it, over and over. You would think that there is something "fancy" about it, to name a few details which I wished this machine had:
* force feedback to stop the motion (right now the machine will just twist your arm as configured, no matter the force) * speed regulation (who needs it? just one speed is good enough) * some sort of patient-id so that you don't need to reconfigure it each time
But not really. Like I said, this is just a dumb linear actuator, with incredibly cheap ABS plastic accessories and a fancy name. Price? 30k euros in the basic kit.
The funny part: for anything medical, you have to demonstrate that this machine is effective somehow. So we had a trial in an hospital, wrote an article about the effectiveness (or lack thereof) and did some paperwork. The idea is that you just have to demonstrate that it doesn't hurt. Of course, a physiotherapist will be twice as effective, but it's more expensive on an hourly basis, so that's why clinics love to buy the machine and just let patients sit on it.
I'm literally disgusted, but I can see everything around "medical" equipment having the same issues. All the economy surrounding hospitals, doctors and equipment is essentially broken, because there's essentially no competition, assured money (by the state in this case) and a lot of corruption going on within the clinics and medical companies (unfortunately).
edit: english.