The fact that we like and endorse capitalism does not mean that we condone absurd manifestations of sheer corporate greed.
It stands to reason that once you purchase a product – specially an expensive one – you have the right to have it repaired if it breaks or otherwise ceases to function, be it by the manufacturer or by someone else.
But unfortunately, this is not always the case.
Case in point: a former jockey was left paralyzed from the waist down after a horse riding accident.
He was thankfully able to walk again with a cutting-edge piece of robotic tech: a $100,000 ReWalk Personal exoskeleton.
So far, so good: but when one of its small parts malfunctioned, however, the entire device stopped working.
That’s when trouble started: to gain his mobility back, he reached out to the manufacturer, Lifeward, for repairs.
But shockingly, the company turned him away, claiming ‘his exoskeleton was too old’.
Futurism reported:
“‘After 371,091 steps my exoskeleton is being retired after 10 years of unbelievable physical therapy’, Michael Straight posted on Facebook earlier this month. ‘The reasons why it has stopped is a pathetic excuse for a bad company to try and make more money’.
According to Straight, the issue was caused by a piece of wiring that had come loose from the battery that powered a wristwatch used to control the exoskeleton. This would cost peanuts for Lifeward to fix up, but it refused to service anything more than five years old, Straight said.
‘I find it very hard to believe after paying nearly $100,000 for the machine and training that a $20 battery for the watch is the reason I can’t walk anymore?’ he wrote on Facebook.”
Insane, right? This shows how advanced medical devices, that can change the lives of people living with severe disabilities, also make their owners dependent on the whims of the devices’ manufacturers, ‘who often operate in ruthless self-interest’.
Nefarious practices imposed by many of them can make their devices difficult or even impossible to fix without their help.
There are regulations called ‘right to repair laws’, without which manufacturers end up not being obligated to share the specialized parts, tools, and guides that make third party repairs possible.
“‘This is the dystopian nightmare that we’ve kind of entered in, where the manufacturer perspective on products is that their responsibility completely ends when it hands it over to a customer’, Nathan Proctor, head of the right to repair project at the US Public Interest Research Group, told 404. ‘That’s not good enough for a device like this, but it’s also the same thing we see up and down with every single product’.
‘People need to be able to fix things, there needs to be a plan in place’, he added. ‘A $100,000 product you can only use as long as the battery lasts, that’s enraging’.”
So Michael Straight had to go to war with Lifeward, who eventually did the right thing, and he was able to get his exoskeleton repaired — but only after an intense campaign in which he went on local TV, got highlighted in a horse industry publication, and gained steam on social media.
