My cocaine dealer versus medical device manufacturer product margin article from earlier this week [6] bruised a lot of sensitive skin.
Good!
I aim to wake people up and cause contusions in the politically correct veneer-like epidermis that serves to protect the gross distortion that is the 3rd party payer system healthcare economic bubble.
I made a 9 minute video that debunks the major rebuttals to the premise made in my article.
- In the first minute or so, I attempt to illustrate that I have a fairly firm grasp on this market share/profit margin/tech trend thing. Either that of I've been very lucking with Blackberry/Apple/Google/Facebook/Groupon etc.
- After 1:20 in the video I outline how much more of a markup the medical product in question exceeds that of illegal cocaine!
- I then have an illuminating discussion with a prominent intensive care surgeon who demonstrates this 4,300+% marked up product as I use glass to do a intubation (put a camera and oxygen tube down a patients windpipe).
- We then go on to discuss how Glass can assist an experienced practictioner such as himself to walk a less experienced practitioner (remember, don't go to the hospital in June, right after graduation) through a difficult surgery/procedure using Glass - from his or her home.
- Next up we demo two products that are less than 1/10th the cost of the Glidescope, and work just as well.
For those of you who argue that you can't achieve mass volumes with Glidescope production hence my margin article logic is faulty, I suggest you read the article again [6]. The prices that I used were for single purchases or lots of ten or so. That's right. I can build a single Glidescope with those part prices. The prices go down as volume increases.
For those of you who attempt to justify a 4,300+% markup on the FDA approval process, I query how someone can make $24, $80 and $800 products that essentially do the same thing. They're in this video and their demonstrated to work just as the Glidescope has.
Just as with Apple, a market leader emerges and its marketing actually convinces consumers to make to ludicrous justifications for ludicrous product markups (hint: the iPhone is one of the few products that actually best the mark up on cocaine in high volume, it's not just the Glidescope).