The price of life

v.s.

It's funny when you think of how much certain things are valued in our society. In recent days I have had a few eye opening experiences to say the least. The medical industry had an overall inflation rate of 5.5% last year, more than any other industry, as if it wasn't overpriced enough. A year's supply of bi-weekly contacts cost me $325.00 from the doctor. I can find them as cheap as $190 online, but I won't be able to use my $120 yearly contacts allowance from my insurance if I go that route. It's interesting how the price from a doctor is roughly $120 more than what it costs to buy the same thing online. So out of pocket I'd still be paying the $200 no matter what route I went!

But lets stick with the price of contact lenses for the sake of argument. I get 52 lenses for a year. that makes each lens cost me roughly $3.85. Each lens is about 14.5 mm in diameter. That's a lot of money for such a tiny piece of plastic. You may argue that it's not the material that is so costly and it's all the fancy research and development and equipment required to manufacture said lenses. I argue that is not the case.

The Intel Core 2 Duo CPU has 291 million transistors packed into a space of 143milimeters-squared (about 12mm across). A transistor is one single logic gate (the basic building block of modern computing). The complexity of this system can not even be compared to a simple contact lens, yet you can buy one of these CPUs online for under $100. The factory to fabricate the CPU is so expensive that CPU manufacturers can no longer afford to build them in the United States. Each factory costs around $2.5-$3.5 billion dollars to make (http://www.cpuplanet.com/features/article.php/1499981) The machinery requires a level of precision within 65nanometers (for the Core 2 Duo). That's roughly .00000256 inches. On top of that, the manufacturing facility must be cleaner than a surgical table and no dust must be present because one spec of dust on the chip would ruin it. So the quality control in this process has to be even more strict than the medical field. Yet this ultra complex device is only worth about 26 of my contact lenses. That's only half of my year's supply! Imagine if you'd have to buy a new computer every 6 months like you have to buy contacts.

I conclude that at least in the contact lens industry the items bought and sold are completely overvalued, and I'm sure there are many other cases in the whole medical industry where the balance is even more skewed.