Britt Young

And I think that it's not that 3D-printed prosthetics are better.

It's not that they do something or are capable of doing things that traditional prosthetics could never dream of.

It's not that.

It's just that...

There's a new material out there.

And because there's a new material out there, that can increase the availability in the market.

It's good that the 3D printed devices are joining the market.

There's just more to be had.

But the barriers are the same regarding insurance.

I think the greatest barrier to access in prosthetics right now has to do with our working legal definition of medical devices.

So the reason that I am requesting my insurance to pay for an ABS plastic prosthetic attachment is because these devices are billed at around $700 or $800.

I don't imagine they cost more than $20 to produce, but because they are medical devices, that is how they are billed.

But if we were able to, in ways that allowed people to stay safe, especially for implants, for prosthetics like artificial hips, we of course want those devices to be safe and tested by the FDA.

But for external devices, the kinds of things that I use in my day-to-day life,

I think we need to be thinking about them as more similar to the sorts of things that you can buy at Walgreens, like walkers, like wrist braces or knee braces.

We have an aisle in Walgreens for these types of devices, and yet they're not considered medical devices and they're not considered prosthetics.

There's a strange artificial boundary around some of these things.

And if we were to change the legal definition of them, we would actually be able to increase accessibility.

So that's what's actually really interesting about 3D printing.

For a while, the dream has been bringing 3D printing, and I mean the kinds of hobbyist devices that have been in people's garages for a little bit now, to the global south.