

Let’s take home appliances. Imagine you are a person who knows how to diagnose and repair microwaves. You keep all the most common parts for the most common brands in your warehouse. You bring them with you based on the customer’s description of what is wrong, and you’re prepared to efficiently apply to correct repair as soon as you’re confident in your diagnosis.
Your typical job looks like this:
- Get a call, get all the billing information (15 minutes).
- Drive out to the person’s home (30 minutes).
- Talk to the customer (15 minutes).
- Unscrew and disassemble the access panels to the appliance itself (15 minutes).
- Diagnose and test things to make sure your initial hunch is correct (15 minutes).
- Remove and replace the faulty part (15 minutes).
- Put everything back where it belongs (15 minutes).
- Drive back to your office (30 minutes).
There, that’s 2.5 hours of your time to do a 15-minute task of installing a part. At the factory, a much less skilled person (who doesn’t need to know how to diagnose different models, or manage a business) could have installed 10 of those in the same amount of time. Maybe more, because they wouldn’t have had to remove an old one.
Most manufacturing is like this. Assembly is easy. Repair is hard. So repair of heavy/bulky/stationary things is always going to be very expensive. It may be more economical to tow the thing to a central place to be repaired, so that the worker doesn’t have to waste too much time driving from place to place.
Throw in the need to keep an inventory of dozens of parts for hundreds of models, and you’re also paying for the warehouse space and parts supply chain, and the interest on the money spent up front to stock up, maybe to be recovered later when a job actually needs that part.
The economics strongly favor assembling new stuff rather than repairing old stuff for anything even remotely simple. It isn’t until you’re up to the $5,000 range that it becomes pretty normal to prefer an all-day repair job over paying for a replacement.
For $500 devices, it’s gonna be pretty hard to economically repair things.
The average cost of a hospital stay in a U.S. hospital is about $3,000 per day, but it varies significantly by location. So long stays like yours might cost between $250,000 and $500,000.
If your insurance covers it (and about 92% of Americans have health insurance), you’d be looking at your annual out of pocket max, which the law caps at $18,000 for family plans or $9,000 for individual plans, but which most people on employer sponsored plans (around 60% of Americans) have out of pocket maxes around $4,000 to $5,000. Source
So for most Americans, your hospital stay would’ve probably cost the individual patient about $5,000. Insurance would’ve paid another $350,000.
But for some Americans, they’d be looking at a $360,000 bill and then would just file bankruptcy, start over with close to a net worth of zero, at least for non-exempt assets (people generally get to keep their homes, cars, and retirement accounts in bankruptcy so it won’t actually be starting from zero if you’re well into a middle age in the middle class).
Or worse, the hospital would realize they’re not getting paid, and then would find a reason to kick you out as soon as you’re stabilized. They have to keep you alive even when you can’t pay, but don’t have to treat you beyond that for free.