Asian manufacturing will continue to undercut Western manufacturing on cost due to the absence of safety culture and the spending that comes with it. The value of human life is higher in the West, and the manufacturing costs reflect that.
Why it's so difficult to produce American-made medical gloves
121–130 of 166 posts
Re: Why it's so difficult to produce American-made medical gloves
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would be a good thing for you to research to build an understanding for the scale of what you are simplifying. Here's a start; just alone during a rather non-pandemic of 2020-2022 the USA alone used about 1.8 billion, with a B, gloves per week ... week.
So 1 billion dollars buys about 8 billion gloves? Or about 4 weeks? So for 12 billion dollars that's a years slack? I am not sure what you are getting at, continuously spending money on cost ineffective gloves just in case there is a problem sometime, including the upfront investment. The scale of the storage? We have 6000 hospitals in the US. which would have to store about 2 million gloves a piece if you decentrali…
That’s brilliant - the government could pay every hospital to stockpile the annual needs for itself and any local clinics and they would just rotate through the stock and replenish as normal.
Re: Why it's so difficult to produce American-made medical gloves
#123Needs an orthogonal approach. Perhaps Elmer's glue that physician’s can dip their hands in and rinse off?
Gloves are sterile wouldn't this tend to embed whatever is on the hands in the surface as it dries?
Which is fine - when you put on gloves, they just cover up whatever is on your skin in the same way.
Re: Why it's so difficult to produce American-made medical gloves
#124Asian manufacturing will continue to undercut Western manufacturing on cost due to the absence of safety culture and the spending that comes with it. The value of human life is higher in the West, and the manufacturing costs reflect that.
That has nothing to do with the issue here, which is that the raw materials cost more because we don’t have access to the right natural resources.
Re: Why it's so difficult to produce American-made medical gloves
#125Whether the US can make "gloves" is actually less interesting than whether the US even has the technical ability, infrastructure, and knowledge to spin up a glove factory in an emergency. Just like drones, batter tech, etc. Another area where the current admin is failing, and putting our country behind China.
As bad as the current administration is, this is one area where they are trying to reverse globalization in the stupidest way possible, so not their fault. These things happened years before now.
Re: Why it's so difficult to produce American-made medical gloves
#126The article headline makes it seem like the factories couldn't make the gloves. But further down it says that the cost was double and factories couldn't get buyers. These are very different failure modes, and speak to very different solutions.
One sounds incapable from a skill perspective, the other is incapable from a market perspective. I’ll take the later over the former any day.
If the price is too high you aren’t skilled enough to make them cheaper
Re: Why it's so difficult to produce American-made medical gloves
#127Needs an orthogonal approach. Perhaps Elmer's glue that physician’s can dip their hands in and rinse off?
Every glove is tested for conductivity to ensure it's not got tiny holes in, you can't do that with 'glue gloves'.
Re: Why it's so difficult to produce American-made medical gloves
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Over time, the latter becomes the former.
Only for a time until the market conditions improve. Humans are incredibly talented and we have a knack for picking up skills.
I wish it were so. It's not.
For an object-level example, look at the difficulties the Russians had reconstituting their industrial base in the post-apocalyptic wasteland they found themselves after the 90s. It took them a decade to figure out how to restart production of the Tu-160M bomber, and they had all the original blueprints! Likewise, for a while, we forgot how to make this "FOGBANK" substance that's somehow important for nuclear weapons.
It's all too easy to forget how to do something if you stop doing it for a while.
Re: Why it's so difficult to produce American-made medical gloves
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could rotate the inventory. Normally companies try to minimize inventory, but someone could pay them to keep six month’s or a year’s supply as a buffer.
It depends on the rationale. If the intent is self-reliance in the event of a trade war (or worse) with China, then even a year's buffer isn't enough to bootstrap home manufacturing from scratch. It needs to be in-service and available before any serious conflict.
Maybe, combined with a buffer, there need to be plans in place to get a factory up and running in six months? Or it could be running at a low level with plans to scale in six months.
Re: Why it's so difficult to produce American-made medical gloves
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only for a time until the market conditions improve. Humans are incredibly talented and we have a knack for picking up skills.
I wish it were so. It's not. For an object-level example, look at the difficulties the Russians had reconstituting their industrial base in the post-apocalyptic wasteland they found themselves after the 90s. It took them a decade to figure out how to restart production of the Tu-160M bomber, and they had all the original blueprints! Likewise, for a while, we forgot how to make this "FOGBANK" substance that's somehow…
And then you pick it back up. Yes, you will get rusty or need to train up but that’s better than lacking the technological capability.